This is the first part of a semester-long series exploring NSU’s history. Check The Current’s features section on the third Tuesday of each month to learn about the university’s development, as gleaned from our writers’ interviews with notable alumni and former staff who experienced our changing campus at different points in its 50-year history.
“We wanted to be the MIT of the south,” Abe Fischler told me in his office.
Surrounded by family photographs and stacks of papers on his desk, he is like a grandfather with a plaid shirt unbuttoned at the collar, a quick smile and a kind of mischievous wit behind his eyes, the kind of eyes that say to you “If you only knew what I know.”
An assistant kept coming in to try to figure out how to get his email account set up on his new iPad and teach him how to use it, only strengthening this image of the kindly grandfather. Sitting in his office, I felt I should have had a tall glass of iced tea in front of me and be munching on a homemade peanut butter cookie, or sucking on a piece of hard candy.
“If I had known I was going to be filmed, I would have dressed nicer,” Fischler said, playing with his shirt.
I came to Fischler because he had been with Nova University almost since its beginning, because he has seen the university grow from 17 students to more 26,000, because he knew the men who helped found it, who gave their land and lent their time, knowledge and expertise to help an experiment in education succeed.
Who were these men and what were they like? How did Nova University come to rise out of the drained swamps of the Everglades and become the 9th largest not-for-profit university in the country? My conversation with former NSU president Abe Fischler became a quest.
And out of that quest, I discovered that NSU began with oatmeal — steaming bowls of it shared among local businessman at Cope’s Restaurant in downtown Fort Lauderdale.
It also began with an old concrete airfield, erected during World War II on Forman Field to help train pilots to land on aircraft carriers. Apathy from state legislatures who had been pumping higher education dollars into north and central Florida and ignored South Florida also created a hole that needed to be filled, especially in graduate and post-graduate science and technology education. Their idea was to create a kindergarten through doctorate education hub in the heart of South Florida, which would become known as the South Florida Education Center.
These men, who called themselves the Oatmeal Club, included Charles Forman, whose family farm would eventually anchor NSU’s main campus, Myron Ashmore, superintendent of Broward County Schools, and Joe Rushing, founding president of the Junior College of Broward College.
For the Oatmeal Club, it was a simple equation: the South Florida Education Center anchored by a world-class research university would mean expanded education, and expanded education equaled growth, development and greater economic opportunity. But it was also about fostering a climate of lifelong education, teaching students how to learn not just how to retain facts and fostering student development from kindergarten through the graduate level.
The Oatmeal Club incorporated into the not-for-profit South Florida Education Center, Inc. in 1961 with Joe Rushing as president and began putting together the pieces of what would become a hub of education that would include Nova Elementary, Nova High School, Broward College and NSU.
But it wouldn’t be easy. They would meet many challenges: fiscal, skepticism from the local community and apathy from state legislators. Nova University itself would barely make it out of the 1960s intact.
Davie was a much different place in the 60s. In 1966, the same year construction of the Rosenthal Student Center began, Davie had 800 residents and 4,000 horses. According to a New York Times article written in 1966, children could be seen barefoot, riding bareback down the main street of Davie, or fishing on the banks of the New South River Canal, or on particularly warm days joining their horses and dogs in the canal for a relaxing swim. Davie was horse and cattle country, with dozens of Western corral-style horse-breeding farms.
The main attraction was citrus, and tourists would come to buy it “by the ton,” or packaged in fancy baskets and shipped off with pecans, glazed orange peel and guava jelly stuffed in the empty corners. There was a general store, the Davie Feed and Ranch Supply, Inc., which became an attraction, not because of some recreation of Hollywood’s idea of the Old West, but because it offered a glimpse into the past at one of the last remaining farm-supply stores in the country, stocked and run the way they were in the early 1900s.
Tourists would come for the riding, offered by dozens of stables in Davie, where trails would wind through exotic and wild tropical growth. Riders could stop to pick wild strawberries or reach up from their saddles and pull oranges right off the trees.
This resemblance of Davie to the Old West days of American expansion is not a coincidence. Inland South Florida was one of the last American frontiers, part of the vast expanse of the Everglades. It was founded by homesteaders from the north and workers returning from the Panama Canal Zone in 1909. It was only accessible by water — an old Mississippi river boat, ill-suited for ocean travel, which departed from St. Augustine and chugged down the Gold Coast and up the New River until it sank one day loaded with cement and other supplies and couldn’t be retrieved.
These were pioneer folk, who worked hard to carve out a deliberately rural life 17 miles from the bustle of downtown Fort Lauderdale, which had been growing exponentially throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s. These men and women loved their seclusion from the city and small-town feel. They cared for their horses as if they were a member of the family. And they only grudgingly began yielding to development in 1961 when the demand to expand westward from the beach could no longer be ignored.
What Davie looked like in 1961, as the Oatmeal Club began development of Nova Elementary and High School, could be described as caught between two worlds. As “Davie In Perspective” put it “a short drive through [Davie], the observer could see a farmer landing an airplane in his backyard, an electronics plant in the midst of an orange grove, and horses grazing on the front lawns.”
To this day, this connection to horses and the outdoors remains. Ray Ferrerro, the fifth president of NSU and president of the Florida Bar Association in 1984, doesn’t think the city and its residents have changed much in that respect.
“At its core, the families who are from Davie, who have lived here all their lives, still have a connection to the outdoors,” said Ferrerro.
Residents were unsure of how to view the development of the SFEC. On one hand, property values surrounding the Forman Field site were doubling, but long-time resident Carl Wolf was afraid all the development would eventually destroy Davie’s rural character.
Councilman Howard Pearson in 1968 echoed the sentiment: “The people who came to Davie did so because they liked to have some elbow room. They don’t want to be squeezed out of here like in other areas where asphalt jungles have come into being.”
However, businesses welcomed Nova University.
Paul Koenig, who ran the oldest law firm in Davie said, “The merchants welcome Nova because of the influx of people who spend money here.”
Nova University began in this climate where Davie was in the midst of an identity crisis, trying to balance the push to develop with maintaining the rural horse culture of its roots. And on July 1, 1964, Warren J. Winstead, then the director of the U.S. Army’s education program for servicemen and their dependents in Europe, became its first president.
Part two in this series will explore how Abe Fischler became Nova University’s second president and the mountain he had to climb to put the university back on solid financial footing, the first graduating class and the university’s growth through the 1970s. Look for it in our Feb. 18 issue.
