Horizons Fall 2013

14 HORIZONS nce upon a time (in the early 1960s), a group of forward-thinking South Florida pioneers met weekly for breakfast at Cope’s restaurant in downtown Fort Laud- erdale. Calling themselves The Oatmeal Club, they discussed the future growth of Broward County, which included ideas to develop an educational center that would develop smart, civic-minded citizens who would, in turn, serve the people of the area. It would be an integrated system that would begin at kinder- garten and reach to the postgraduate level. The ideal student would experience growth through every edu- cational stage of this model. The capstone of the complex would be an independent university. In 1961, members of The Oatmeal Club incorpo- rated the not-for-profit South Florida Education Cen- ter, Inc. (SFEC). With the cooperation of the Broward County Board of Public Instruction, the SFEC formed the Nova Educational Complex, which included Junior College of Broward County (now Broward Col- lege) and Nova Elementary School. In 1964, Nova High School opened. That same year, The Oatmeal Club started a small graduate college, Nova University of Advanced Technology, on Las Olas Boulevard. “The name Nova is a derivative of the Latinword novus (new) and the visionaries believed that their concept was new and dif- ferent,” according to Julian Pleasants, Ph.D., who wrote the book The Making of Nova Southeastern University: A Tradition of Innovation, 1964–2014 , a comprehensive history of NSU. In 1965, a gift of $300,000 from Edwin Rosenthal and a $1-million gift from Louis Parker made possible the construc- tion of NSU’s first two buildings, which today bear the men’s names. The facilities were built in Davie on what had been For- man Field, a training field for naval aviators during WWII that had been owned by brothers Hamilton and Charles Forman, early supporters of the university. In 1961, the land was desig- nated by President John F. Kennedy for educational use only. The Rosenthal Student Center was completed in 1967. The Parker building, dedicated in 1968, provided research facilities for the Germ-Free Lab and the Life Sciences programs.