UWash Archives

The work for this post was begun under a wrong assumption. I thought that the Chicago economics Ph.D. (1926) Shirley J. Coon was a woman and I quite honestly expected to add another PhD trained woman economist to the alumnae list of Economics in the Rear-view Mirror. The portrait of Shirley J. Coon from the University of Washington yearbook from 1931 and the discovery that “J” stood for “Jay” forced me to update my Bayesian prior in the matter of Shirley’s identity.

The post turns out to be rather short as I have been unable to find many footprints left in the sands of time by Dean Shirley Jay Coon. A dissertation on the economic development of Missoula, Montana seems as inauspicious a topic as one could imagine, even for the German Historical School, so Coon’s academic obscurity comes as little surprise one century after his dissertation year at the University of Chicago.

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Shirley Jay Coon
Timeline

1887. Born 16 June in Walworth, Wisconsin.

1909. Beloit College undergraduate.

1915. M.A., Ohio State University

1915-19. Member of the department of economics and business administration at Ohio State.

Price expert for the Ohio food administrator during WWI

1919-1927. On the faculty of Montana State University.

1920-27. Dean of the Business School, Montana State University.

1925-26. Sabbatical to complete Ph.D. at Chicago.

1926. Ph.D. University of Chicago. “Economic Development of Missoula, Montana,” unpublished doctoral dissertation.

1927-1938. Professor of Economics at the University of Washington.

1931-38. Dean of the college of economics and business at University of Washington.

1938. Resigned due to ill health.

1938. Died 4 October in Seattle, Washington.

Sources: Obituary in The Daily Missoulian (Missoula, Montana) · Oct 5, 1938 and University of Washington yearbooks.

Image Source: University of Washington yearbook TYEE 1931, p. 38.

Recalling my active days in the rat race of academia, a cold shiver runs down my spine at the thought of departmental rankings in the hands of a Dean contemplating budgeting and merit raise pools or second-guessing departmental hiring decisions.

But let a half-century go by and now, reborn as a historian of economics, I appreciate having the aggregated opinions of yore to constrain our interpretive structures of what mattered when to whomever.

Research tip: sign up for a free account at archive.org to be able to borrow items still subject to copyright protection for an hour at a time. Sort of like being in the old reserve book room of your brick-and-mortar college library. This is needed if you wish to use the links for the Keniston, Carter, and Roose/Andersen publications linked in this post.

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1925 Rankings

R. M. Hughes. A Study of the Graduate Schools of America (Presented before the Association of American Colleges, January, 1925). Published by Miami University at Oxford, Ohio. (See earlier post that provides the economics ranking from the Hughes’ study)

1957 Rankings

Hayward Keniston. Graduate Study and Research in the Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania (January 1959), pp. 115-119,129.

Tables from Keniston transcribed here at Economics in the Rear-view Mirror:
https://www.irwincollier.com/economics-departments-and-university-rankings-by-chairmen-hughes-1925-and-keniston-1957/

1964 Rankings

Allan M. Cartter, An Assessment of Quality in Graduate Education Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1966.

1969 Rankings

Kenneth D. Roose and Charles J. Andersen, A Rating of Graduate Programs. Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1970.

Tables transcribed below.