Donald D. Jensen was born 29 April 1930 in Holdrege, Nebraska to T.C. and Clara (Warp) Jensen. He and his identical twin brother Ronald were the youngest of the family, having three older brothers—Vearl, Stanley, and Omar—and one older sister, Elaine. His father was an auctioneer and sales barn operator, and his parents traveled around central Nebraska managing auctions and sales for many years. These were the Depression years, and the family lived in several Nebraska towns and made a brief move to Mississippi. In the early 1950s his parents helped Clara’s brother, Harold Warp, set up the Pioneer Village in Minden, and were the curators and managers for the Village until their deaths.

The twins, Don and Ron, were inseparable as children, dressing alike and doing everything together. In August 1945, when they were 15, Don and Ron were at the train station. As Ron was walking outside, absorbed in a book, he did not hear an approaching train and was killed. This tragic accident had a lifelong effect on Don; talking about it would bring on a period of deep depression, so friends and family learned to avoid the subject.

Don was graduated from Kearney High School in 1947 and went on to attend the University of Nebraska. While still in high school in 1946 and 1947, he participated in All-State, a three-week summer University program in music and speech, and it was here that he met his future wife, Janet Kepner. Don and Jan began dating at the University in the spring of 1949, and, partly because a house near the UNL campus belonging to Don’s parents became available, they married between their junior and senior years on 15 August 1950 in Osceola. Both were graduated from UNL in 1951 with distinction and Phi Beta Kappa honors, Don with a B.A. in Arts and Sciences and Jan with a B.S. from Teachers College. They were reported to be the first undergraduates to have been initiated as a couple into Phi Beta Kappa.

Don was in ROTC at the University and so was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Military Police Corps upon graduation. He served in the Army from 1951-54, training in Georgia, and serving in Michigan and Germany with the 2nd Armored Division. His first child, Joli, was born in Germany shortly before they left. He returned with his family to Lincoln in 1954 to work on a masters degree in psychology which he received in 1955 from UNL. His first publication, “A proposed statistical study of phenotypic variation in human populations,” appeared in The Plains Anthropologist in 1954, and his master’s thesis, “A critical examination of learning in Paramecia” appeared in abbreviated form in Science in 1957.

Don took his small family to New Haven, Connecticut, where they lived in veteran’s housing at Armoryville—68 quonset huts set up near the Yale Bowl and polo grounds. As a Ph.D. student at Yale University, Don continued his interest in animal behavior and experimental psychology. Near the end of his time there, a son, Michael, was born. In his three years at Yale, he co-authored several articles on experimental procedures, and completed his dissertation—“Behavioral effects of feeding, fission, and ultraviolet microbeam irradiation in Paramecium aurelia.” He received his Ph.D. in comparative and experimental psychology from Yale in 1958.

Following Don’s graduation, the family sailed to Groningen, the Netherlands, where Don spent a two-year NSF postdoctoral fellowship studying at the Zoological Laboratory at the University of Groningen with G.P. Baerends. Don was one of the first Americans to study ethology (animal behavior) in a European laboratory. During this time, he engaged in controversy with Nobel prize winner Konrad Lorenz and also began development of his nemertine theory of vertebrate origins. His interest in ethology would lead him to participate in most of the biennial International Ethology Conferences for the next nearly fifty years, in cities in Europe, Australia, Canada, and the U.S. His interest in nemerteans would take him to summers in marine laboratories in France, Norway, Australia, Bermuda, Alaska, California and Florida.

From the Netherlands, the family moved in 1960 to Bloomington, Indiana, where Don began nine years on the faculty of the Department of Psychology at Indiana University, including a year’s sabbatical at the Anatomisk Institut in Oslo, Norway. At IU, Don was assigned to teach introductory psychology classes, and became interested in methods for teaching large lecture classes. He developed what he called a “cafeteria system” for introductory psychology in which students could come at any time to listen to videotaped lectures and then take computer-generated repeatable tests. The success of these innovative methods led to an outstanding teaching award at IU.

In 1969, the family, now augmented by the birth of a second son, David, moved back to Lincoln and Don began what would be more than thirty-four years on the psychology faculty at the University of Nebraska. He continued teaching large classes in introductory psychology using his computer-based methods and then upper-level courses in animal behavior, research methods, and, in later years, scientific approaches to parapsychology. This was a favorite course with him and with his students and was the course he was teaching when he went into the hospital on Thanksgiving Day 2003.

His research interests were in the early evolution of the vertebrate behavior apparatus (brain, sense organs, and effectors), conceptual and methodological issues in the study of learning, and the use of ethological data (i.e., behavioral content and time budgets) in laboratory studies of learning and motivation. Of his many publications, his most frequently cited articles are on polythetic operationism and some of these are still being used in classrooms across the country.

Don’s life centered around teaching (he received awards for outstanding teaching at both Indiana University and the University of Nebraska) but he also participated enthusiastically in academic and community service. He served for many years in the University Senate, and was the Executive Secretary of Alpha Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. He was active in street planning, serving on the Antelope Valley Task Force and other community task forces and committees. He was a member of Sigma Xi, American Psychological Society, American Association of University Professors, International Neuropsychological Society, Open Forum, So. 48th Street Preservation Association, Norden Club, and many other professional and civic societies.

Over the course of his life he taught thousands of students. They, as well as his colleagues, friends and family, will long remember his passion for using the scientific method and critical thinking to decipher underlying truths about the world. As Darwin said at the end of On the Origin of Species there is, indeed, grandeur in this view of life.

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