Brock Fagan

From Philosopedia.org

Fagan, W. Brock (1887 - 21 December 1968)

Fagan was born in Richmond, Indiana, in 1887. He received the B. A. degree from Earlham College in 1910, the M. A. degree from the University of Kansas in 1915, and he took additional graduate work at Johns Hopkins University. He taught at Park College and Johns Hopkins University prior to joining the staff at Iowa State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Iowa [UNI]) in 1915 as an assistant professor of English. He was advanced to the rank of professor in 1919, assumed emeritus status in 1955, and continued to serve in that status until 1967.

According to UNI President J. W. Maucker in a memo to the staff that Fagan had died,

Brock was a colorful figure and, to judge by the inquiries concerning him from returning alumni, one of the faculty members most successful in getting under the skin of students.

One of his students in the 1940s, Warren Allen Smith, wrote of Fagan that

He got under Bible Belt students' skin because they had never before come up against an intellectual who was an iconoclast, a unitarian (not a Unitarian), an Emersonian, and a seeming pessimist. He had outspoken views about the weaknesses of human institutions. He fearlessly taught about atheism, deism, transcendentalism, and the literary, philosophic humanism favored by Midwestern Unitarianism. Some Iowans knew him only as the person who wrote many iconoclastic as well as acerbic letters to the editors so often and on so many topics.

English Department Chairman H. Willard Reninger, according to the Faculty Senate Minutes (3 February 1969), at the time of Fagan's death remembered him in a memo to the faculty::

By his colleagues who knew him best, [Mr. Fagan] will be remembered for his high academic standards; his interest in students who, as he said, "meant business"; and his unrelenting ironical approach to students with ability who refused to use it. His most loyal supporters were those students who, having once smarted under his demand for excellence, had themselves become older and wiser, and as teachers learned to admire him. He was respected for the right reasons, never loved for the wrong ones. As late as 1960 the most often inquired-about teachers in the department by former students were Brock Fagan and Hazel Strayer.
By his most knowledgeable English colleagues he will be remembered for his intelligent, inductive approach to the English language and linguistics which made him an early defender of descriptive grammar as opposed to prescriptive grammar. Until about 1946 -1948 when younger men with special knowledge of the English language were brought into the department, Brock Fagan was, by dint of self-education, years ahead of his colleagues in this discipline.
He will be remembered for his philosophical habit of mind which often illuminated both sides of a controversy, his humor and salty wit, and especially for his subtle, gentle irony, the indelible mark of the civilized man. Were he alive among us today at forty years of age, he would understand the country's campus dissidents: he was an early faculty pioneer in the controversy himself as he urged the use of the democratic process in all campus affairs. Indeed, in a very real sense he lived too soon. As he grew older it was the newer, younger staff members who understood him best, and accepted him as a modern fellow spirit in academic life. He was withal an unusual combination of the classical eighteenth century man of reason, order, and restraint; and of the twentieth-century inductive investigator who accepts a democratic morality as his first article of faith.

Fagan died on 21 December 1968 in Houston, Texas, where he had for two years made his home with his daughter.

The family indicated that a funeral service would not be held; Mr. Fagan's body was willed to the Baylor University School of Medicine.