Florida Atlantic University

• 1. Introduction

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  Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, still carries the outline of a wartime airfield. Four runways from the 1940s are visible on the main campus, where they mostly hold parked cars. A public research university now surrounds that pavement, with more than 30,000 students from 180 countries. Its story begins with a base that had been left behind, and with farmland taken from families who never expected to lose it. How does an abandoned military field become a university? Whose land was it before the army arrived? How did one campus in Boca Raton grow into a network spread across several counties? And why do the school's teams call themselves the Owls?

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• 2. Radar Field Years

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  During World War II, Boca Raton Army Airfield served as the Army Air Corps' sole radar training facility. The base was built on the existing Boca Raton Airport and on 5,860 acres (23.7 square kilometers) of neighboring land.

  Most of that neighboring land belonged to Japanese-American farmers of the Yamato Colony, a settlement that was already failing. The government took the land through eminent domain. In the early days of the war, the farmers had little recourse.

  Radar was only part of the field's work. Aircraft flew anti-submarine patrols along the coast. The base also served as a stopover for planes being ferried to Africa and Europe by way of South America.

  In early 1947, the military decided to move future radar training to Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi. The air force's departure that year left the field essentially abandoned. Those empty acres would eventually interest a banker in Boca Raton.

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• 3. Opening Day

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  On the 15th of July 1961, the state legislature passed an act authorizing a new university in the city of Boca Raton. The goal was to meet the growing demand for education in South Florida.

  Thomas F. Fleming Jr., founder of Boca Raton's First Bank and Trust Company, negotiated with the federal government to secure title to the air base lands. He also established the Endowment Corporation to raise money for planning.

  The doors opened on the 14th of September 1964, with 867 students in five colleges. The school had 350 employees, and 120 of them were faculty.

  Those first students could enroll only in upper-division and graduate courses. The state wanted the institution "to complement the state's community college system, accepting students who had earned their associate degrees from those institutions."

  The first degree the university ever awarded was an honorary doctorate. President Lyndon B. Johnson received it on the 25th of October 1964, at the dedication of the university. Students who needed a place to live got their first option in September 1965, when Algonquin Hall opened.

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• 4. Spreading Out

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  The first step beyond a single site came in 1971, when the university opened its Commercial Boulevard campus in Fort Lauderdale. South Florida's population was growing quickly. That pressure led the school to admit lower-division undergraduates for the first time in 1984. A third campus followed in 1985, in downtown Fort Lauderdale on Las Olas Boulevard.

  In 1989, the Florida Legislature named Florida Atlantic the lead state university serving Broward County. A Davie campus opened in 1990, and a Dania Beach campus followed in 1997. Back in 1994, the university had bought 50 acres in Port St. Lucie for a Treasure Coast campus, run in partnership with Indian River State College. Classes there ended with the spring 2012 term. The Jupiter campus opened in 1999 and was named for the late John D. MacArthur.

  Seven presidents have led the university since its founding. Frank Brogan, a former Lieutenant Governor of Florida, left in late 2009 to become Chancellor of the State University System of Florida. Mary Jane Saunders was named president on the 3rd of March 2010 and resigned on the 15th of May 2013. On the 17th of January 2014, the Board of Trustees announced John W. Kelly, formerly a vice president of Clemson University, as the seventh president. He was to start on the 1st of March 2014. Earlier presidents included Anthony J. Catanese, Helen Popovich, Glenwood Creech and Kenneth Rast Williams.

  Medicine arrived in 2004, when Florida Atlantic and the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine began a medical training program inside the Charles E. Schmidt College of Biomedical Science. Early plans called for a new teaching hospital on the main campus, built with Boca Raton Community Hospital. Successive budget deficits in 2007 led the hospital to delay its participation indefinitely. Florida Atlantic then established its own College of Medicine in 2010.

  The Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution joined the university in 2007. The Florida Legislature set aside $44 million for Florida Atlantic to acquire the institution and its 600-acre campus in Fort Pierce. Those additions left the university with campuses spread across 120 miles.

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• 5. Campuses Up Close

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  The Boca Raton campus covers 850 acres between the cities of Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale. It serves about 19,077 students, roughly 70% of the student body. Its facilities include a 6,000-gallon shark tank for aquatic research and a movie theater. It is also home to Hoot/Wisdom Recordings, a student-run record label created in 2002 through the Commercial Music Program. Music from that program reached a Top 10 spot on Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles Sales Chart in its first week of release. The same campus hosts the A. D. Henderson University School, FAU High School and the Lifelong Learning Society, which serves more than 19,000 senior citizens.

  The John D. MacArthur Campus in Jupiter occupies 45 acres. It holds eight classroom and office buildings, a library, a 500-seat auditorium, three residence halls, a dining hall, a museum building and a utility plant. Residents of that site include the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College, Scripps Florida, the FAU Brain Institute and the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience. About 1,262 students, or 4% of the total, study there.

  Two buildings on Las Olas Boulevard, Askew Tower and the Higher Education Complex, together make up the Fort Lauderdale campus. They teach communication, graphic design, architecture, and urban and regional planning to about 900 students, or 3.2% of the student body. Another 1,612 students, about 6%, study entirely at a distance.

  On 38 acres in western Broward County, the Davie campus serves about 3,488 students, or 13% of enrollment. That makes it the second largest campus by headcount. It sits on Broward College's Central Campus, so students can start at Broward College as freshmen and finish FAU degrees in more than 14 disciplines. A shared 112,000-square-foot library serves both schools. Researchers there also pursue environmental projects focused on restoring the Everglades.

  The Dania Beach campus, known as SeaTech, occupies 8 acres between the Atlantic Ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway. It enrolls about 70 students, roughly 1% of the total. Its home department, Ocean Engineering, was founded in 1965 as the first ocean engineering undergraduate program in the nation. Faculty and students there work on acoustics, marine vehicles, hydrodynamics, physical oceanography, marine materials and nanocomposites.

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• 6. Ocean and Imaging Research

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  Florida Atlantic holds the Carnegie Foundation's classification as a Research University with Very High Research Activity. It has formed partnerships with the Scripps Research Institute, the Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies and the Max Planck Society.

  Two centers of excellence anchor much of the work: the Center of Excellence in Biomedical and Marine Biotechnology and the Center for Ocean Energy Technology. Florida's Emerging Technology Commission chose them for grants. The university beat out some of the state's top research universities, including the University of Florida and Florida State University, for that initial funding.

  Researchers and students at the centers design technologies to explore the sea and harvest renewable energy. They also search for new medicines and develop therapeutics to combat agents of bioterrorism. In 2007, the university and Lockheed Martin announced an exclusive licensing agreement. It covers a rapidly deployable, autonomous mooring buoy system for military and scientific uses.

  In 2010, the United States Department of Energy named Florida Atlantic one of three national centers for ocean energy research and development. The Southeast National Marine Renewable Energy Center joins sister centers in the Pacific Northwest, run by the University of Washington and Oregon State University, and in Hawaii, run by the University of Hawaii. Its researchers study power from ocean currents and from ocean thermal energy.

  The College of Engineering and Computer Science houses an Imaging Technology Center and a NASA Imaging Technology Space Center. They work on digital imaging for medical technology, surveillance, communications, inspection, manufacturing, visual recognition and digital video. The NASA center is one of 12 NASA Research Partnership Centers nationwide. Its laboratories sit on the Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale campuses. The university describes itself as the only one in the nation offering this technical concentration.

  The Research Park at Florida Atlantic University, with properties in Deerfield Beach and Boca Raton, gives outside companies access to the university's facilities and expertise. It runs the Technology Business Incubator for start-ups. The Boca Raton campus also hosts the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences.

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• 7. Students and Alumni

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  In 2021, the student body counted 24,663 undergraduates, 3,380 graduate students, 440 doctoral students and 254 medical students. Among undergraduates, 61% were from ethnic minorities. Florida Atlantic has long ranked as the most racially, ethnically and culturally diverse institution in the State University System of Florida. U.S. News & World Report placed it 27th most diverse in the nation. For the fall 2021 freshman class, the acceptance rate was 60%.

  The middle half of that class reported high school GPAs of 3.73-4.33, ACT composites of 23-29 and SAT totals of 1100-1270. Average class size is 33 for undergraduates and 12 for graduate courses, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 20:1. The top three undergraduate majors are elementary education, accounting and management. The average first-year student is 18, while the average undergraduate is 24 and the average graduate student is 33. The 4-year graduation rate in 2021 averaged 47.5%.

  The Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College offers a liberal arts education inside a public university, and it requires all students to live on campus. The University Scholars Program on the Boca Raton campus offers freshmen special seminars, forums and advanced course substitution.

  Housing on the Boca Raton campus includes Indian River Towers, Heritage Park Towers, Glades Park Towers and Parliament Hall, a lakeside freshman hall with 614 beds. The Innovation Village Apartments opened in fall 2011 with 1,200 beds for upperclassmen, graduate students and medical students. Over 4,000 students live on campus in Boca Raton. A program called the Weeks of Welcome runs 11 days across all campuses, with events such as Hall Wars, athletic competitions between dormitories.

  About 300 registered student organizations range from sailing and Ultimate Frisbee to a pottery guild, a jazz group and chess. Student tuition feeds them, at $12.32 per credit hour, and that adds up to roughly $10 million a year for student government to allocate.

  For 2025, U.S. News & World Report ranked the university 103rd among public universities in the United States. Washington Monthly ranked it 41st nationally in 2024.

  Over 185,000 alumni have earned degrees since 1964. Rafael "Ralph" de la Vega became vice chairman of AT&T Inc. and CEO of AT&T Business Solutions and AT&T International. Patricia McKay became executive vice president and chief financial officer of Office Depot. Luis Alberto Moreno is president of the Inter-American Development Bank. Maynard Webb sits on the board of Salesforce.com and served as eBay's chief operating officer. Fern Kellymeyer, a professional tennis player, entered the ITA Hall of Fame in 1999. Aaron Parnas, a TikTok journalist and attorney, has over 7 million social media followers. Carrie P. Meek, a former U.S. congresswoman from Florida's 17th district, holds an honorary Ph.D.

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• 8. Owls and Traditions

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  In 1971, the Audubon Society designated the Boca Raton campus a burrowing owl sanctuary. The birds like it for two reasons. Predators are few, because the campus sits near the Boca Raton Airport. The ground was also cleared of vegetation back when it was an airbase. The school describes the bird this way: "The feisty bird, traditionally associated with wisdom and determination, serves as the university's mascot."

  The athletic program began in 1979, when the university first sponsored intercollegiate teams. Today 19 varsity teams compete in NCAA Division I, wearing FAU Blue, FAU Red and FAU Silver. The Owls joined Conference USA for the 2013-14 season. On the 21st of October 2021, Florida Atlantic accepted an invitation to the American Conference, and it became a full member on the 1st of July 2023. Coaches who have worked there include Howard Schnellenberger, Carl Pelini, Matt Doherty, Rex Walters, Lane Kiffin, Mike Jarvis, Dusty May, Willie Taggart and Tom Herman. Joan Joyce coached women's softball and golf.

  The annual Shula Bowl pits Florida Atlantic against its rival, Florida International. It is named for coach Don Shula. When the series began, Howard Schnellenberger for Florida Atlantic and Don Strock for Florida International had both worked under Shula at some point. Every fall before the first football game, the Student Government Association sponsors a "Bonfire" where the opposing team's mascot is burned in effigy.

  Basketball has its own rituals. The "Red Hot Madness and Stroll Off" pep rally introduces the team with 3-point shoot-outs, slam dunk contests and step performances by National Pan-Hellenic Council fraternities and sororities. At the annual rivalry game against Florida International, the "Bury the Burrow in Red" event asks students to wear as much red as possible and fill the Burrow, the university's multi-purpose arena.

  The official spirit group, the "prOWLers," began in February 2002 to support the men's basketball team during its run for the Atlantic Sun Conference Championship. The Owl Rangers paint their bodies in the school colors, and the hOWLetts attend gameday events and help recruit athletes. Since 2002, students have used Owl Fingers, the "OK" hand sign, to wish luck on football point after attempts and basketball free throws.

  Homecoming, called the "Owl Prowl," takes place each fall. Past editions have included costumed dances, a golf cart parade and comedy shows. Students tailgate in an organized area called the Rat's Mouth, a name that echoes the Spanish translation of Boca Raton.

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