Carlos Albizu University

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message.
This article has been tagged since July 2006 .

The Carlos Albizu University (CAU) is a private non-profit university offering undergraduate and graduate studies in psychology, business, and education. It has two campuses: one in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the other in Miami, Florida (USA).

1 Campuses
2 Miami Campus
3 The Founder, Dr.Carlos Albizu-Miranda
4 Program Offered at CAU
5 External links

[edit] Campuses

Carlos Albizu University, Miami Campus
Carlos Albizu University, San Juan Campus

[edit] Miami Campus

Geographically located in Miami, Florida, an area rich in multicultural diversity and laden with the complex socioeconomic and psychosocial realities that accompany such diversity, the Miami Campus of Carlos Albizu University has been in a forefront position in training students who can respond to the needs and demands of a multi-ethnic population. The Miami Campus is a newly developed facility of 70,000 square feet within 18.353 acres of land, allowing expansion of the physical facilities up to 250,000 square feet. The physical facilities include classrooms, faculty and administrative offices, library, training clinic, computer laboratory, and research area. Housing is readily available in close proximity to campus.LOCATIONMiami-Dade County has become a multicultural and international center in which immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean have made Southern Florida their permanent residence. Miami has one of the highest percentages of people of Hispanic origins in the U.S. The city's cultural mix offers a unique opportunity for our students to better understand the various ethnic groups that make up our community.The Miami Campus is responsive to the bilingual and multi-cultural community of South Florida.

We are located in a thriving and modern 18-acre campus in the heart of the Doral Area in Miami, west of the Miami International Airport. The Miami Campus is located at 2173 NW 99th Avenue, Miami, Florida 33172. The area is readily accessible through four major thoroughfares: SR826 (Palmetto Expressway), SR836 (Dolphin Expressway), SR112 (Airport Expressway), and the Florida Turnpike.

[edit] The Founder, Dr.Carlos Albizu-Miranda

Carlos Albizu-Miranda is the first Hispanic Educator to have a North American University renamed in his honor. On January 1, 2000 the Board of Trustees of the Caribbean Center for Advanced Studies, which includes the Miami Institute of Psychology, conferred this honor on Dr. Albizu by renaming the two-campus institution, Carlos Albizu University.

This posthumous honor recognized Dr. Albizu’s long and distinguished career as a professor of psychology, his role in founding the institution that now bears his name, and his service as the first president of the National Hispanic Psychological Association.

Born on September 16, 1920 in Ponce, Puerto Rico he earned a B.A. in Education at the University of Puerto Rico with a major in psychology and a minor in history. Following service in the U.S. Army during World War II, he worked for the Veteran’s Administration, first as a psychometrician and later as Chief of the Vocational Rehabilitation and Education Center in Puerto Rico.

In 1950 Albizu and his wife, Ermida Garcia Muñoz, left Puerto Rico for Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, where he earned an M.S. degree in Experimental Psychology in 1951 and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in 1953. He completed his Clinical Psychology Internship at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Marion, Indiana. When Dr. Albizu graduated from Purdue, he became one of the first Hispanics to earn a Ph.D. in Psychology in the United States.

Albizu and his family returned to Puerto Rico and began teaching at the University of Puerto Rico. He also started his private practice in psychology. He became a full professor at the University, and was recognized by his peers as an outstanding educator, diagnostician, psychotherapist and consultant.

During these years of professional growth, Dr. Albizu became deeply concerned about the need for qualified psychologists in Puerto Rico. No graduate programs in psychology were available in Puerto Rico and only a few students were able to pursue graduate studies in the United States. Those who did were trained in models and techniques not always sensitive to the needs and sociocultural characteristics of Hispanic clients.

In 1966, Dr. Albizu took what proved to be a bold pioneering step. He founded the first independent professional school of psychology in North America, initially known as the Instituto Psicológico de Puerto Rico. In 1971 the name was changed to Caribbean Center for Advanced Studies. Since its founding, the school’s philosophy has always been to adapt models of psychological assessment and intervention to the sociocultural characteristics and needs of the population it serves. In 1980, Carlos Albizu expanded his field of vision by moving to the U.S. mainland and opening a sister campus as the Miami Institute of Psychology. As a result of these two campus locations in Miami and San Juan, a significant number of Hispanic psychologists are either former students of Carlos Albizu-Miranda or of his pupils. Clearly, his impact in training minority and mainstream mental health professionals in sociocultural sensitivity has been enormous. In addition to founding the two-campus school, he published extensively, with special emphasis on cross-cultural issues in mental health training and service delivery, including “A Training Model for Minority Psychologists” and “Psychological Concomitants of Poverty.” From 1980 to 1982 he was the first president of the National Hispanic Psychological Association.

He was a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and served on the Committee of Professional and Scientific Conduct and Ethics. In 1980 the American Psychological Foundation honored Dr. Albizu with a special award for the development of psychological education in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean Region. He was a member of several honorary scientific organizations including Sigma Xi, Psi Chi, and the New York Academy of Sciences.

Carlos Albizu died on October 6, 1984. In a memorial article in the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 1985, Vol. 7. No. 3, Marion A. Wennerholm writes:

“Dr. Albizu had an exceptional ability to dream great dreams and then convert them into realities. His enthusiasm was contagious and he was able to stimulate and motivate his colleagues by sharing his dreams with them and involving them in carrying them out. Through his tireless efforts and despite times of great adversity, his dream of a professional school of psychology became a reality.”