How Florida Tech Began as Brevard Engineering College — Melbourne, Florida

Brevard Engineering College, the school that became Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, grew out of the population surge around Cape Canaveral. In a 2018 account for Florida Tech News, university historian Gordon Patterson writes that the first wave of missilemen reached east central Florida in 1948 and that an army of 75,000 technicians, engineers and scientists followed over the next ten years, with no technical or engineering schools close by.

Jerome P. Keuper arrived in Melbourne early in 1958 to take a senior engineering job in RCA's Systems Analysis section of the Missile Test Project. He held a master's degree from Stanford and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and in Connecticut he had taught evening classes at Bridgeport Engineering Institute. When Keuper asked its founder, Arthur Keating, about opening a Florida branch, Keating told him to start his own college, and Keuper brought copies of the Bridgeport accreditation documents south with him.

Keuper shared the idea with three members of the RCA Systems Analysis team, mathematicians George Peters and Donya Dixon and computer scientist Robert Kelly, who met him after work at the Pelican Bar on A1A. Inertial guidance engineer Harold Dibble, who had taught in an evening engineering program at UCLA, joined in early spring 1958. The group assigned roles: Keuper as president, Dibble as dean, Peters as head of mathematics, Kelly as financial officer and Dixon as secretary.

Their four-page outline of Brevard Engineering Institute listed seventeen items. Classes would meet Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings from seven to ten, admission was open to anyone with a high school diploma, and instructors would be professionals employed in Brevard industry rather than full-time faculty. The Florida Tech About page preserves the legend that a bystander pushed 37 cents across the bar as the first donation, and a 1967 Florida Tech account calls that story a legend whose precise facts no one knows.

Local backing came slowly. Patterson records that the Brevard Joint Chamber of Commerce declined Keuper's request for an endorsement and instead invited the University of Miami to set up a similar program in Brevard County, until Miami's dean of engineering answered that Keuper was on the scene and should do it himself.

A fundraising Engineer's Cotillion on June 6, 1958, at the Trade Winds Club in Indialantic raised enough money to print a fall catalog, and registration was taken at the Country Club college office of the University of Melbourne. Prospective students told Keuper they wanted to attend a college, not an institute, so Brevard Engineering Institute became Brevard Engineering College before the first class met.

The catalog issued in July 1958 listed nine classes, among them Advanced Calculus, Servomechanisms and Transistor Theory I. Tuition was $35 for one course, $68 for two and $96 for three, and classes were set to begin on September 22. By early September 154 students had registered, 114 undergraduate and 40 graduate applicants, with an average age of thirty-three. The first faculty meeting gathered forty-five prospective instructors at Hensel's Red Rooster Restaurant in Eau Gallie on September 18, 1958.

Most of the faculty worked for contractors at the Cape, and eight of the twenty-three held doctorates. Keuper and Dibble recruited seventy-five of the first students from fellow RCA workers, with others coming from General Electric, Aerojet, Convair and Radiation, Inc. Midway through the first semester, Newsweek and Time both sent reporters to cover the new Brevard college.

Winning accreditation was the next hurdle for the Melbourne college. According to a Florida Tech account of the 1964 campaign, the executive director of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) told Keuper in 1959 that the school was not ready, and by 1963 SACS made clear that a new library had to come first. Melbourne's city commissioners passed a resolution of endorsement and then a $5,000 yearly allocation to the college, and the Melbourne Junior Women's Club set out to raise $100,000 for the library.

The drive peaked at a formal dinner dance in the Gold Room of the Ramada Inn on April 4, 1964, where Radiation Inc. founders George Shaw and Homer Denius pledged one percent of the company's annual pretax income to BEC. When the five-member SACS team reached Melbourne on May 10, 1964, the library walls stood only to the second story with no roof. Wernher von Braun, one of the first to call the school Countdown College, spoke at its fourth commencement that June, and late in November 1964 SACS announced that Brevard Engineering College had received full accreditation.

The library was formally dedicated on January 23, 1965. When the library moved in 1984, the original Melbourne structure was renamed the Jerome P. Keuper Administration Building, which still links the 1964 accreditation campaign to the present campus.

Brevard Engineering College gained its own grounds in Melbourne at an April 15, 1961, groundbreaking for its first building, where Dibble turned the first shovel of dirt, according to a Florida Tech profile of Harold Dibble. The name took longer. In June 1962 Keuper gave honorary degrees to Florida Secretary of State Tom Adams and Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom, and Adams advised him to draw up a charter amendment, because a storefront school in Tampa held the rights to the name Florida Institute of Technology.

Adams joined the Brevard Engineering College board in December 1965. After the Tampa group let its corporate fee lapse, the board approved the new name on August 1, 1966, and the Secretary of State's office approved the charter amendment two days later, as described in the university's 1966 history. Keuper argued that the old name was provincial and that nobody outside Florida had heard of Brevard. Backers of the planned state university in Orlando, Florida Technological University, objected, and the dispute faded after Claude Kirk won the governorship in November 1966.

At BEC's fifth commencement in Melbourne on June 15, 1966, Navy oceanographer Rear Admiral Odale Waters told graduates the college showed evidence of becoming the MIT of Florida, a reference to its new graduate studies in oceanography.

Growth followed the new name. Florida Tech's 1967 history records 1,541 students in 1966 and 2,118 a year later, and an advertisement titled The Moon and 37 Cents, which won a Time contest, ran in the June 23, 1967 Florida edition and reached 86,757 Florida households. The ad described a $3 million, 85-acre independent center of higher learning in Melbourne, built in eight years without foundation grants or wealthy alumni.

The same year the Melbourne library passed 20,000 books, Gleason Auditorium opened to the public on October 15, 1967, and plans were announced for a student union, later the Denius Student Center, and a science tower, later the Crawford Building. Cape test conductor Jim Stoms, a boyhood friend of Keuper's from Fort Thomas, Kentucky, joined in 1964 and designed the first business courses, the root of today's Bisk College of Business.

Keuper remained president of the Melbourne institution until 1986, a 28-year tenure listed on Florida Tech's past presidents page, and was succeeded by John E. Miller.