The Florida Institute of Technology is, in terms of proximity, the closest university to Vero Beach, but fewer than 200 of the nearly 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students taking classes on its cozy, 130-acre campus in Melbourne come from Indian River County.
The school’s new president and chief executive officer hopes to see more.
“We really don’t have a huge number, considering how close we are to Vero,” said T. Dwayne McCay, the former NASA rocket scientist and University of Tennessee vice president who spent 13 years at Florida Tech as a top-tier administrator before being inaugurated as the private university’s fifth president last month.
“We get a few transfers from Indian River State College, and we do have a few from St. Edward’s,” he added. “But we don’t attract as many students from that area as I would like.”
There’s something else from our community that McCay would like to attract more of: Money.
McCay, who said he has played a lot of golf in Vero Beach, hopes to eventually entice some of our more-affluent barrier island residents – many of whom have a genuine appreciation for education and a deserved reputation for philanthropy – to become the donors he needs to make Tech one of the best science, engineering and aeronautics schools in America.
“Obviously, it’s a fertile area for fundraising, but we haven’t been able to find the magic formula yet,” McCay said, adding that the 30-plus miles separating Florida Tech and wealthy, seaside communities such as John’s Island pose a challenge.
“So one of my goals is to find out what the passions are of those people and establish whether our passions overlap with theirs,” he added. “If they do, then there are possibilities – because there’s no doubt that if they want to be part of this university, we would welcome it.
“That hasn’t happened yet, but we definitely have the desire and we plan to make it happen.”
Sooner rather than later.
Tech’s Board of Trustees selected McCay in June to succeed Anthony Catanese, who served as the university’s president for 14 years and tapped into his expertise as an urban planner to oversee a transformational era during which the school built new residential, research and educational facilities, increased its enrollment, raised admission standards and soared in stature.
“We needed a builder to get the campus to where it is,” McCay said, “and that’s what Dr. Catanese was.”
Catanese’s capital improvement plan was funded in large part by a $50 million gift from the New York-based F.W. Olin Foundation, which saw Tech as a “diamond in the rough” with the potential to become the leading technology university in the Southeast.
The gift, announced in 1997, provided funding for Tech’s Olin Engineering Complex, Olin Physical Sciences Center and Olin Life Sciences Building.
A decade later, Brevard County resident and businessman Ed Scott – a former U.S. Justice Department executive – was the principal donor to create the internationally renowned Scott Center for Autism Treatment, located on Tech’s campus.
Then, two summers ago, Tech welcomed to its campus Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the historic mission’s lunar module pilot and the second man to walk on the moon. Now 86, he joined the school’s faculty as research professor of aeronautics at the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute, headed by his son, Andy, which was created to promote a manned settlement on Mars.
“We went from a small, struggling technical school with a high-quality faculty and good students to a school with the facilities we needed to move to the next level,” said McCay, who was hired as Tech’s provost and chief academic officer in 2003 and became its executive vice president and chief operating officer in 2011.
Over the past few years, Tech has annually earned national recognition from the likes of U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, Barron’s and the Fiske Guide to Colleges for everything from its academic standing to alumni earnings.
This year’s incoming freshmen class boasted a 3.76 grade-point average and had an average Scholastic Aptitude Test score of 1180, making it the “highest quality group that we ever admitted,” McCay said.
Even more impressive: Across the past two decades, 82 percent of Tech’s pre-med students have been admitted to medical schools.
Currently, Tech has more than 500 graduates working for the Harris Corp., more than 500 working for the Northrup Grumman Corp. and more than 500 working for NASA. There are dozens working in Silicon Valley. Others are employed by tech giants Microsoft and Google.
And because one-third of the school’s enrollment comes from outside the U.S. – India, China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are among the nations that send students there – it should come as little surprise to see Tech graduates occupying the No. 2 position with China’s version of our Federal Aviation Administration and the top spot with the Bank of Dubai.
Another of its graduates detoured from the school’s science and engineering core and now works as a fashion editor at Vogue, prompting McCay to quip, “We’re not sure how that happened.”
Whatever the field, though, Tech graduates – the school has 50,000 alumni worldwide – are enjoying professional successes that have enhanced the school’s recognition and reputation across America and around the globe.
McCay, who said he hired 200 of Tech’s 350 faculty members, is eager to build on that momentum.
“We’ve grown to a size that is sufficient to do almost everything we want to do,” McCay said. “Now it’s time to focus on a handful of areas where we can be not just good or even really good, but great. And by great I mean as good as anybody in the United States.”
That process already has begun.
After a hand-picked faculty committee identified 21 areas to be considered for further investment – areas where additional funding for existing programs would allow Tech to compete with the nation’s best schools – a committee of deans and department heads whittled the list to nine.
McCay then took the shortened list to industry experts around the country, told them his goal and asked them to evaluate the recommended areas using their criteria, which included availability of jobs, the need for research and their companies’ long-range plans.
Using the experts’ input, McCay and his advisers will select three to five “Pillars of Excellence,” as he called them, and that’s where the university will focus its investments.
What are the areas?
“Only one person knows,” McCay said with a grin, adding that one of the likely areas wasn’t on the original list but was added when multiple leaders in research and manufacturing suggested it.
“They told me this was an area we need to invest in – an area where we could take the lead and be on the cutting edge,” he said. “It’s going to be hard to not do that one.”
McCay plans to start building “Pillars” as soon as January, when he’ll ask his on-campus team in each of the areas to assemble a list of resources needed to move forward, such as faculty, technicians and other support personnel, as well as a base of operations and equipment.
The university, which was founded in 1958 as the Brevard Engineering College and became the Florida Institute of Technology in 1966, historically attracts what McCay described as “very serious students” who were “somewhat apathetic” toward life outside the classroom.
“They were here to get an education and to have a career,” McCay said, recalling the school’s initial mission of offering NASA engineers an opportunity to pursue advanced degrees. “And they’re still pretty serious. But now we have some wonderful residence halls and a number of athletic teams – even football – so there’s an activity level and an excitement level on campus that didn’t exist in 2003.”
Twenty percent of Tech’s student body participates in varsity athletics, which includes 22 athletic teams, 21 of which compete in the wildly successful Sunshine State Conference. The lone exception is the football team.
It was in 2010 that Tech announced its plans to add an NCAA Division II football program. Three years later, the Panthers embarked on their inaugural season, competing in the Gulf South Conference.
“When we started football, I wasn’t sure about it because it’s got an economic component that is not necessarily on the positive side,” McCay said. “But it has generated an incredible enthusiasm in the community and a great enthusiasm across the campus.
“All of the other sports are wonderful, but football is different in the South,” he added. “I didn’t think I’d ever see our students with their shirt off and their chests painted, but football has been a huge boon to the campus.”
The school does face one lingering problem, which has to do with how people refer to the university.
The school’s official name is Florida Institute of Technology, but it’s also commonly known as both FIT and Florida Tech. And the multitude of monikers has hindered the school’s marketing efforts.
According to Wes Sumner, Tech’s vice president of marketing and communications, university officials decided in the early 1990s to switch the school’s familiar name from FIT to Florida Tech.
The change, however, has met with resistance from older alumni who prefer “FIT” and refuse to embrace “Florida Tech.”
“I wouldn’t have thought it was a big deal, but I talked to the people who did the marketing for Virginia Tech and they had the same problem,” McCay said, referring to the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, which into the 1980s was also known as VPI.
“We’ve spent a lot of years trying to be Florida Tech and we’re still bipolar,” he added. “Depending on who you’re talking to, we’re known as both. So I’m not sure what we should do.”
He’s absolutely sure, though, that he’s taking Tech in the right direction.
“This might sound immodest, but I think our faculty and the university as a whole are pretty excited to have a rocket scientist back as the president,” McCay said, referring to his years as a senior engineer and chief of the Propulsion Division at the NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
“That’s how we started, and now we’re sort of come full circle and we’re back to a rocket guy,” he added. “That doesn’t necessarily make the best president, but it fits the image of the university.”
Will that image appeal to students from our county and, more important, donors from our barrier island?
Florida Tech does enjoy a longtime relationship with Piper Aircraft and, across the bridge, owns and operates the Vero Beach Marine Laboratory, which was established in 1981 as a four-acre, satellite campus equipped with a system that pumps seawater directly from the ocean into aquaculture tanks for scientific research.
“We have some ties to the Vero Beach community,” McCay said, “and I’d like to have more.”