Man, 89, gets USC degree he earned a lifetime ago

Dan McIntosh Brown had it all along.

But when the soon-to-be nonagenarian crossed the stage Saturday at Colonial Life Arena to receive his economics degree from the University of South Carolina, the 2015 summer graduation class gave him a rousing standing ovation.

“I was overwhelmed,” said the frail but cogent Anderson County resident who will turn 90 later this month, speaking to reporters and photographers after the graduation exercises. “I didn’t expect all this attention. But I appreciate it very deeply.”

Brown had attended USC in 1942-43 and again in 1946-47. In between he served in the Army during World War II in Europe. All this time, Brown thought he had failed to graduate from USC, because he thought he was three credits shy of the requirement.

Brown worked as an Internal Revenue Service agent in several South Carolina cities, including Rock Hill, Spartanburg, Anderson and Greenville, starting on Sept. 7, 1948. That was two days after his college sweetheart, Ada , whom he met at USC and married, graduated from USC – and when he was supposed to have graduated. Brown retired from the IRS Aug. 30, 1980, he said.

Throughout his life, Brown also has been an active member in the United Methodist Church, where he said he was a certified lay speaker for 39 years. But in February 2009, that came to an end because he said he’d lost most of his vision due to macular degeneration, a loss of vision at the center of the vision field due to a deteriorating retina.

It wasn’t until Ada, his wife of 66 years, died in May 2015, that he focused his thoughts again on the supposed unfinished business of his college degree, according to Caroline Bell, Brown’s senior advocate.

“One day we were sitting at the table and he asked me, he said, ‘When I write my obituary, we gotta figure something out because I have three (unfinished credits) left over.’” Brown didn’t want his obituary to say he only “attended” USC, Bell said. She contacted Carter Noble, a friend in Anderson, who knew USC Trustee Chuck Allen.

That started things rolling. If Brown had really been short of credits, he would have to have gone for an honorary degree, Bell said. But the school learned he had enough credits all along.

And Brown wanted to leave a legacy, Bell said, and though he is a humble man, decided to come to the graduation exercise to make a statement.

“Regardless of how old you are, or how long it’s been – a short time or a long time – you can get a degree and graduate,” Brown said. “The university has this wonderful program. They have created this special school where somebody, that if for some reason had to leave school prior to graduating, they can go to special school online and graduate. I think this is a wonderful thing that the University of South Carolina has created.”

Not having a degree could be damaging to one’s career, Brown said. “Not having a degree, in my particular situation, didn’t have an effect, but in a lot of cases it could,” he said. Brown said he was never stationed in a place where he could return to college. “Now somebody could go back, online,” he said.

Susan Elkins is chancellor of USC Palmetto College, which offers online bachelor’s degrees from each the four-year campuses in the USC university system. “One of the things we are really trying to do is reach out to those students who started, but sometimes life gets in the way and they’re just not able to finish,” she said.

Brown’s transcripts weren’t in an electronic file like USC students’ academic records would be today, Elkins said. But registrars got into the paper vault, found Brown’s records and discovered he’d started at USC in the 1940s as a commerce major in the USC School of Business.

Brown had been thinking all these years he was three credits short of fulfilling the requirements for a degree. Due to changes in the curriculum over time, school officials discovered Brown had completed enough credits “and had done extremely well,” meeting all the requirements for a bachelor’s degree in economics.

“Usually people will still be a few hours short, but he had done so much and done so well when he was here in the ’40s, he actually met the criteria for earning the bachelor’s degree.”

Education is the foundation of a good quality of life, Elkins said.

And, she said, “For those of us in this business, this is the paycheck. This will be a day that everybody here at the university – USC Trustee Chuck Allen, President (Harris) Pastides – all of us will remember as being one of our best days ever, because we helped make this 90-year-old’s dream come through.”

Launched in the fall of 2013, Palmetto College has graduated 500 students so far, Elkins said, and thousands more are in the pipeline.

USC is still checking its records to see if Brown is the university’s oldest graduate, officials said.

This story was originally published August 8, 2015 at 6:39 PM.