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The Founding & Early Years of the University of South Florida

By Joe Marzo

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The University of South Florida was born in the mid-20th century, at a moment when Florida’s population and ambitions were rapidly expanding. Unlike older universities in the state, which grew out of the 19th century, USF was the first major state university conceived, planned, and built entirely in the 20th century. Its story is one of vision, political will, social change, and the optimism of a new era in Florida’s history.


A University for a Growing Florida

In the years after World War II, Florida’s demographics shifted dramatically. Returning veterans, the postwar baby boom, and waves of new residents settling in the Tampa Bay region created intense demand for higher education. Until then, the state’s public universities were concentrated in Gainesville and Tallahassee, far from the Gulf Coast’s booming communities. Tampa leaders, supported by legislators, began lobbying for a new university to serve Central Florida.


In 1956, their efforts succeeded. The Florida Legislature formally chartered the University of South Florida, making it the state’s fourth public university. This marked a turning point: for the first time, a state university would be designed from the ground up with modern educational priorities in mind.


Choosing the Land

The location chosen for the university was symbolic of Florida’s transformation. USF’s main campus was built on 1,700 acres of land northeast of Tampa, land that had once been home to the sprawling Henderson Air Field, a World War II Army Air Corps training base. Before that, it had been the site of one of the world’s largest citrus groves. What had been farmland and airstrips would now become a hub for research and innovation.


A Name and a Mission

In 1957, the Florida Cabinet officially approved the name “University of South Florida.” Though geographically it was located in the central part of the state, the name reflected how undeveloped South Florida still was at the time; Tampa represented the southernmost urban center with a major university presence.


Governor LeRoy Collins envisioned the school as a “modern university for a modern Florida.” Unlike traditional colleges steeped in classical curricula, USF would emphasize science, technology, and practical training alongside liberal arts. It would be, in many ways, a forward-looking institution designed for the jet age.


Leadership and the First Students

That same year, Dr. John S. Allen, an academic administrator from the University of Florida, was appointed USF’s first president. Allen was known as a pragmatic yet visionary leader. He believed the new university should focus not on athletics or traditions first, but on academic rigor and research. Under his direction, the campus plan took shape, with concrete-block modernist architecture reflecting the era’s emphasis on efficiency and growth.


The College of Education became USF’s first academic college, with Dr. Jean Battle serving as its founding dean. Fittingly, the first student accepted into USF in 1959 was Barbara Johnson Campbell, who enrolled to become an elementary school teacher. In that moment, USF’s promise — to educate Floridians for a rapidly changing world — began to materialize.


Grappling with Cold War Politics

But the university’s early years were not free of controversy. The late 1950s and early 1960s in Florida were marked by the work of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, better known as the Johns Committee, after its chairman, state senator Charley Johns. Originally formed in 1956 to investigate the NAACP and its role in the civil rights movement, the committee turned its focus to Florida’s universities, where it pursued suspected “subversives” — communists, racial integrationists, and homosexuals.


Because USF was a brand-new university without entrenched traditions, it became especially vulnerable to political oversight. The Committee scrutinized faculty, denounced works like The Grapes of Wrath and Brave New World as immoral, and even objected to biology instructors teaching evolution as fact.


One of the most notorious cases was that of Dr. Sheldon Grebstein, an English professor suspended for assigning literary criticism on Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac. The Committee deemed the material indecent. Other faculty and staff were similarly targeted, including several accused of “sexual deviance.” Careers were ended, reputations destroyed, and a culture of fear took hold on campus.


President John Allen resisted this pressure, testifying before the Florida Legislature in 1963 and insisting that USF should be a place where “inquiry and debate could flourish.” His defiance helped define the university’s identity as a modern institution committed to academic freedom, even under political attack.


Desegregation and the First Black Students

Another defining feature of USF’s founding was the context of the Civil Rights Movement. While older Florida universities had battled desegregation for years, USF opened its doors in 1960, six years after Brown v. Board of Education. In 1961, just one year after its first class entered, USF admitted its first Black students.


Though their numbers were small, their presence was historic. These pioneers integrated the campus without the violent upheaval seen at institutions such as the University of Mississippi or the University of Alabama. Still, they faced social isolation, limited access to housing, and the daily burden of integrating a new, overwhelmingly white institution. President Allen’s leadership again proved critical: he held firm that USF was to be a modern, inclusive university, quietly ensuring that the principle of equal access was upheld from the beginning.


The arrival of these first Black students signaled that USF, though born in the segregated South, would embody a different vision for higher education in Florida — one that reflected the legal and moral changes reshaping the nation.


Growth and Student Activism in the 1960s

Even as politics swirled around it, USF began to expand. In 1964, the Florida Legislature approved the creation of a College of Business, signaling that USF was no longer just a regional institution but a growing hub for professional education. The university also began establishing satellite centers, which would eventually develop into branch campuses in St. Petersburg, Sarasota, and Fort Myers.


By the late 1960s, student groups were beginning to organize around civil rights, free speech, and opposition to the Vietnam War. These developments highlighted a paradox at USF: though it had been born in a politically cautious environment, its youth meant it was also more adaptable and more open to the rising tide of student activism than older, tradition-bound universities.


From Humble Beginnings to National Recognition

Looking back from 2025, the University of South Florida’s journey from a handful of students on a former airfield to one of the nation’s leading institutions is nothing short of extraordinary. Once vulnerable to political intrusion and struggling with the challenges of desegregation, USF has grown into a premier research university, recognized nationally and internationally for its innovation and impact. In 2023 it joined the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU), cementing its place among the country’s elite research institutions.


Today, with more than 48,000 students across multiple campuses, over 240 degree programs, and pioneering initiatives like the new Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, and Computing, USF continues to push into the future.


The university has also achieved top-50 national rankings among U.S. public universities, and many of its programs — from engineering to public health — are ranked among the best in the country. Its endowment has grown to nearly $900 million, the largest of any public university founded after World War II, fueling its rapid rise in research productivity and student opportunity.


What began in 1956 as a bold idea for a “modern university for a modern Florida” has become a reality far exceeding those early ambitions — a living symbol of how vision, resilience, and progress can transform a fledgling school into a national powerhouse in less than seventy years.


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