Brian Jorgensen is the founding director, now director emeritus, of the Core Curriculum, and an emeritus assistant professor in the Department of English. He earned his PhD at Northwestern University, and his BA at the University of Notre Dame.
Now retired from BU, he has continued to serve as a guest lecturer in the humanities and social sciences Core courses, including as the traditional first lecturer in the first-year fall humanities course where his discussion of Gilgamesh is often the first college lecture new incoming students experience.
In 1995, Jorgensen received the Metcalf Cup and Prize, the University award for excellence in teaching. The following excerpts from the award announcement describe well the traits which the Metcalf Cup and Prize is intended to honor:
One student tells of first meeting Brian Jorgensen during orientation, when he lectured about the Core Curriculum: “In less than an hour, Professor Jorgensen had opened the eyes of a newly graduated high school student to the limits of reason—and he had given me the desire to pursue knowledge.”
Student letters about Professor Jorgensen abound in accounts of his virtuosity, whereby he can fill in for a missing professor with a brilliant impromptu lecture that connects the subject of the moment with materials that have been studied and will be studied in the course.
Another student aptly sums him up: “In and out of the classroom, Jorgensen pushes his students to see every challenge as an occasion for improvement, every revision as an opportunity to add ‘one more detail’, every punctuation, every word, every flip of the page as an avenue by which more clearly and ably to understand the truth, and refute the immoral.”
Besides lecturing, Jorgensen devotes significant time to his pursuits as a musician, songwriter, and author.