Short answers, pulled from the story.
The university officially opened its doors in 1960 with just five buildings. The institution began operations on land that was once a 5,000-acre temple orange grove and later became the Hillsborough Army Airfield.
Former U.S. representative Samuel Gibbons championed the school's establishment and earned him the title Father of USF. John S. Allen served as the first president from 1956 until his retirement in 1971.
Today the university operates across three distinct campuses including Tampa serving over 41,000 students, St. Petersburg serving approximately 4,500 students per year, and Sarasota-Manatee hosting nearly 2,000 students annually. The entire system consolidated into what is now described as one university geographically distributed in summer 2020.
USF emerged as a major research institution during the 1980s under third president John Lott Brown who oversaw the establishment of the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute on the Tampa campus in 1986. By 2019, USF spent $568 million on research and development ranking it 43rd nationally and 25th among public universities according to the National Science Foundation.
The university integrated and admitted its first African-American student Ernest Boger in 1961 two years after opening. Boger graduated in 1964 with a bachelor's degree in psychology.