Word: mcconn
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...recommendation of Dean Max McConn of Lehigh University to partition the student bodies of the American universities into the two divisions of kindergartens and colleges, seems to be an efficient means of separating the fiddling grasshoppers from the industrious ants. The Lehigh Dean would give the gentlemen with the social and activity bent a large playground in the country where they get plenty of fresh air and be able to satisfy their pressing desires to attain extra-curricular prominence. The remaining portion of the collegiate population, intent upon scholastic honors, and which, according to Dean McConn, amounts to one half...
...chief objections to the application of this theory are two. One is that it violates the purpose of the university to educate as many people as it is possible without making the standards ridiculously low. By the theory of Dean McConn, a few would acquire a great amount of erudition, but the vast majority would get only a superficial knowledge, too scant to be of any value whatsoever. Another apparent fault is the fact that the one half of one percent of super-students would be entirely excluded from contact with actual experience and the other people of lesser intelligence...
Thus, while the studious person could work in peace, and the activity man could go the merry round of pleasure unhampered by difficult scholastic duties, those persons who fit in neither category would be without any recourse. Perhaps, under the McConn regime such controversies as Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare's plays could be decisively settled, but who would sell insurance...
Here at Harvard there is a peculiar opportunity to study the unfolding of this thought, for there is an ever greater flow of students to the graduate schools who are trying to make up for the time wasted at some college conducted on Dean McConn's principles of nihilism. Time and again from these people is heard the statement "I never knew what study was until I came here". Obviously one cannot like study if he doesn't know what it really is; and an acquaintance with the vitality of knowledge is not possible to those whose pursuit...
...Dean McConn ignores the fact that some bodies of undergraduates are demonstrably activated by a desire for study and plunges headlong into an explanation of its impossibility. He is convinced that the exclusive purpose of an education for nine out of ten undergraduates is to prepare them for business. This absolute neglect of the value of study for its own sake and for the appreciation of human knowledge attendant on it hardly needs comment. Its glaring fallacy will be too familiar to anyone acquainted with the already large literature inspired by the spiritless existence of the retired business...