Each year, a new class of competitively selected undergraduate and graduate students brings to the University the promise and potential for their futures. They are the vital natural resource from which greater resources grow; as they progress, the University gains strength. Each year, courses are added, dropped, and improved as the faculty of more than 1,500 teacher-scholars strives to build a stronger curriculum that will challenge these students to think logically and creatively while they gain insight, experience, and skills to realize their academic objectives. Each year, the University develops new approaches to enlarge and enhance growth experiences outside the classroom and laboratories. Each year, this Catalog records the growth in one of the nation's major public research universities.
Today's University - with 21,398 students, over 148,000 alumni, about 120 major buildings and 3,100 acres in and around Storrs, three professional schools and five regional campuses in other parts of the State, and a library of more than two million volumes - is a far cry from the institution in its first days.
In April 1881, the Connecticut General Assembly established the Storrs Agricultural School after accepting a gift of 170 acres of land, several frame buildings, and money from Charles and Augustus Storrs. The Storrs brothers were natives of Mansfield, the eastern Connecticut town in which the University is located. The School opened on September 28, 1881, with twelve students in the first class. Growth and change came fast in the early years. Before the turn of the century there were two name changes, to Storrs Agricultural College in 1893 and to Connecticut Agricultural College in 1899. In 1933, two years after the institution celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, it became Connecticut State College, a name more in keeping with its steady advances and broadened mission. Six years later, in 1939, the General Assembly designated the institution the University of Connecticut, an acknowledgement of the institution's developing importance to the State in graduate and professional education, research, and public service.
Since the historic legislative act of 1881, the University has grown steadily and dramatically to fulfill its mandated objectives as a provider of high quality education and public service and as a contributor to society through research. The University has reached out with services to all parts of the State, and it has promoted cultural enrichment by making the main campus a center for the arts in Connecticut.
Jorgensen Auditorium on the Storrs campus regularly schedules internationally prominent symphony orchestras, musical soloists and chamber groups, dance companies, and touring dramatic productions. This is complemented by Department of Music recitals in von der Mehden Hall and by Department of Dramatic Arts productions. The William Benton Museum of Art has been acclaimed as one of Connecticut's finest art museums; the diversity and quality of its exhibitions contribute to the vitality of the arts at the University.
The University stands with the leading institutions of the nation in the size, scope, and contributions of its research involvement. In the last ten years, University researchers at Storrs and at the Health Center in Farmington have attracted more than one-quarter billion dollars in support of their work.
For more than a million Connecticut citizens each year, the University is more than classroom and laboratories, cultural presentations and athletic contests; it is direct contact with University people working through institutes, centers, extension services, and extended and continuing education programs in all 169 cities and towns in Connecticut.
The University's public service mission, which has grown apace with academic offering and research endeavors in both scope and importance, reaches out into local government offices and schools, into pharmacies and medical offices, into corporate laboratories and small business showrooms, onto farm lands and fishing boats. Each year, new programs evolve to meet newly identified needs in Connecticut.