The University of Miami began life nicknamed Cardboard College
The University of Miami opened in 1926 just as Florida's land boom collapsed and a great hurricane struck. Its first building sat half finished for over twenty years, classes met in a hotel behind flimsy partitions, and students knocked on doors to raise money. Today it is a top-tier research university.
Local citizens founded it in 1925 to pursue inter-American studies, the arts and tropical research. George E. Merrick, creator of Coral Gables, gave 160 acres and nearly 5 million dollars, much of it in land contracts and mortgages. The charter came on 8 April 1925, and a first class of 372 students enrolled the next year. Then the boom went bust, the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 dashed hopes of recovery, and the half-built Merrick Building left students crammed into the Anastasia Hotel.
Board members resigned in 1929 as Florida's economy crashed. In 1930, more than 60 students and several teachers arrived when the University of Havana closed amid Cuban unrest, but the university still sought bankruptcy protection in 1932. Reincorporated in 1934, it grew under its first president, Bowman Foster Ashe, adding law, business, a marine laboratory and, in 1952, a medical school.
Like other Southern institutions of the Jim Crow era, it barred Black students until 1961. In 1966 Ray Bellamy broke new ground as the Deep South's first major Black college athlete on a sports scholarship, and in 1973 Terry Williams Munz, a golfer, became the first woman in the nation awarded one. The university also leased south campus buildings to the CIA from 1961 to 1968 for JMWAVE, a covert operation against Castro's Cuba. President Henry King Stanford stopped the band playing Dixie from the 1968 football season.
Growth accelerated later. Under Edward T. Foote II the endowment rose from 47.4 million dollars in 1981 to 465.2 million in 2000, and a fundraising drive aimed at 400 million brought in 517.5 million. By 2025 the university enrolled 20,104 students, employed over 21,000 people, making it the second-largest employer in Miami-Dade County, and counted four Nobel laureates among its faculty. Its Hurricanes teams have won five football national championships since 1983.
Source: University of Miami
