RARE \"UCONN\" Albert N. Jorgensen Signed 3X5.5 Card For Sale

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for sale a RARE! "University of Connecticut" Albert N. Jorgensen Hand Signed 3X5.5 Card.

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Albert

Nels Jorgensen (1899 – 1978) was an

American academic administrator who served as

the seventh president of the University of Connecticut (1935–1962). Its

longest-serving president and its youngest at age 36 at the time of his

appointment, Jorgensen led UConn's transformation from a sleepy, unaccredited

agricultural college to a major modern university. UConn

came into existence via the renaming of Connecticut State College in 1939.  Student

enrollment rose from 844 in 1935 to 11,877 in 1962—an increase of over 1400%. Opened

in 1955, the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts on was named in Jorgensen's

honor. The Harriet Jorgensen Theatre is named after his wife. Born

in Lanark, Illinois, in 1899 to Danish immigrant

parents, Jorgensen was raised in Sabula, Iowa.

He earned a bachelor's degree in English from Coe College in 1921

and served as a school principal in Sabula and superintendent in Arlington,

Iowa. He earned an M.A. in psychology from the University of Iowa in 1925 and a Ph.D in

educational administration from Iowa State

University in 1929. He held positions at Iowa State, Michigan State University, and the University of Buffalo (1931–1935)

before assuming office as UConn's seventh president in 1935. Jorgensen

quickly proved a visionary advocate for state higher education, delivering

speeches to hundreds of groups around the state and obtaining $3 million of new

funding from the state legislature within three years of his appointment. In

1943, UConn took over the running of the Hartford College of Law, which became

the University of Connecticut School of

Law in 1948. UConn

began awarding doctoral degrees by 1950 and launched a medical school (now part

of UConn Health) in 1961.

Among the buildings erected during Jorgensen's tenure were the iconic Wilbur Cross Library with its golden dome,

the Edwina Whitney and Walter Childs Wood residence halls, a

concert hall, student union, engineering and home economics buildings, the

Social Sciences (Henry Ruthven Monteith) and Humanities (Jamie Homero Arjona) Buildings, and the

Physical Education Building and Memorial Stadium to support surging interest

in college athletics and the new Yankee

Conference. A Fort Trumbull campus

was established for returning World War II veterans; it ultimately became UConn's

Avery Point regional campus. New university branches were also opened in Stamford and Torrington. In 1935, only one

national honorary society was represented at UConn.

By 1960, twenty-six national honorary societies had established chapters there,

including Phi Beta Kappa in 1956. Such was

Jorgensen's impact on UConn's trajectory that his presidency was termed

"the Jorgensen Transformation" by university historian Bruce M.

Stave. Jorgensen's

presidency was also marked by controversies over academic

freedom. The president defended a German-American professor accused

of disloyalty during World War II, though the professor was ultimately stripped

of his citizenship and deported. During the McCarthy era,

a UConn physics professor and former Communist

Party member refused to betray the names of other party members

to the House Un-American Activities

Committee. Jorgensen resisted political pressure to fire him, though

the faculty member ultimately resigned. Toward the end of his presidency,

Jorgensen clashed with the faculty over issues of compensation, shared governance, and

academic standards. Jorgensen

served as president of the American

Association of State Colleges and Universities and on the

boards of the American Council of Education and the

National Commission on Accrediting. He was a member of the president's council

of the Association

of Public and Land-Grant Universities and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also

held honorary doctorates from Coe College, the University of Maine, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Rhode Island, and Rhode Island College. After

his retirement from UConn in 1962, Jorgensen served as director of the

Washington office of the Institute of

International Education for five years. He died in Scottsdale,

Arizona, in 1978. He was survived by his wife, Harriet Spring Jorgensen, and

their two children.