[longer profile; maze apparatus] …It was as a teacher, however, that Shepard had his greatest effect. Theodore Schneirla and Norman R. F. Maier, leaders in the fields of comparative & learning psychology, often acknowledged their intellectual debt to him. Students found Shepard to be an extremely systematic, original, and critical-minded teacher. More than one former student expressed the opinion that if Shepard had published the material he presented in courses, he would have founded a “school” of psychology.
Shepard taught well-organized courses with a great deal of confidence in what he said. He knew the literature so well that students stood in awe of his grasp of it. They soon came to believe that what Shepard said about maze learning, reasoning, perception, and so on was correct and what others said was wrong. Shepard would pick out the many neglected controls in the experiments that dominated the literature and convince his listeners that he was one experimenter who knew what precautions to take. For Shepard was very much at home in the laboratory and accumulated vast amounts of data from rat runs in his various mazes.
…The comparative course was considered quite unique because undergraduate students were given the opportunity to work in the comparative setting. (Similar work on other campuses was limited to graduate students.) Studies were carried out on fish, ants, rats and cats mostly in maze situations similar to the one Shepard had built in the back section of the laboratory…From their observations Shepard’s students plotted graphs that reflected the typical trial and error curves that Edward L. Thorndike had published 12 years earlier. For comparative purposes Shepard had his students collect similar data on humans. As an actual maze for humans could not be conveniently constructed, an ingenious maze drawn on paper was used. In later years Shepard solved this problem by actually constructing a human maze in the basement of Hill Auditorium. See Volume II for photos of the human maze. The subject followed the paper by looking through a paper tube which cut off all view beyond the pencil lines between which his eye was traveling. The results from these experiments showed that in all cases the human subject learned the maze in essentially the same manner as did the animals.
Generalizing from these experiments, Shepard argued that there were 4 types of learning. The first type was the ability to form simple associations. The second type involved the selection of necessary elements and the elimination of errors leading to some consequence.
A drop of sugar was placed on a plate of glass which had been covered with coal oil smoke so that the tracks of an ant crawling on it could be recorded. The glass was placed near an ant hill. Soon one of the ants would begin exploring the large “black plain” wandering aimlessly until it discovered the sugar. It followed its crooked path back to the ant hill. Soon all the ants were marshaled behind the first ant who led them back to the sugar—not over the original circuitous path but rather over a straightened line that led to the goal via the shortest distance.
…The comparative course stirred up considerable interest on and beyond the campus. The Michigan Alumnus devoted a two page story to it.25 The Detroit News Tribune, in its Sunday, March 10, 1912 edition ran a full page illustrated article entitled “A University Education for Mice: Professor John Shepard of the University of Michigan Conducts Some Remarkable Experiments to Learn How Animals Think”. After reviewing the work the article concluded, “and so Professor Shepard’s play work is seen to be worthwhile. At any rate it affords a lot of mice the benefits of a university training.”
…His strong points, curiously enough, often had the effect on his students of stifling creativity and productivity. Shepard appeared as such a severe and cogent critic that his students seemed to hesitate doing anything on their own for fear of receiving in turn the unsparing criticism he directed toward the work of others. And then again, he worked so hard and so long in his laboratory and accumulated huge amounts of data which were never published. Some of his students had visions of themselves working just as hard and getting no further than he did.
The tragedy of the man was that he did not publish…Instead he and his assistants continued to collect data. There was always something else to try, some other variable to control.
…If Shepard’s failure to publish caused disappointment and embarrassment to his students, it must be said that it was profoundly more tragic for the man himself. When Shepard retired in 1951 the task of writing up his life of research became almost an obsession with him. It was constantly on his mind and was interjected into almost every conversation he had with former colleagues and students.
In 1959 Shepard completed a monograph entitled “An Unexpected Cue in Maze Learning” which he considered to be the only part of his main study that was detachable. He submitted the manuscript to the Psychological Monographs but the editor turned it down because he believed that Shepard’s contribution on floor cues had been known for a long time, making the monograph anticlimactic. Shepard had the work lithoprinted at his own expense.
Shepard was contracted by a Berlin firm to write a chapter summarizing the research on maze learning for a tentative handbook of zoology. He accepted the assignment because such a review fit well as background for his own work. Shepard worked over a year on the chapter and submitted a 37-page paper. Some misunderstanding appeared to develop at this point and Shepard withdrew his chapter. It was never published.
As the years began to catch up with him, Shepard seemed to sense his own professional tragedy. In 1960 he wrote to E. G. Boring that his “only real source of anxiety now is the realization that much of my life would be lost if I don’t get my maze results published.”’ In 1963 he had a slight stroke which affected his speech. A year later he entered a nursing home. Shepard died on 2 November 1965 at the age of 84. His last research writings were gathered and examined by former students. It was regretfully decided that there was nothing which might be salvaged for publication.
[In his advanced systematic psychology course Shepard requested that graduate students prepare a digest of his lectures. The lecture notes for 1939–194084ya, prepared by Seymour Wapner, have been deposited at the Archives of the History of American Psychology. See “Lecture Notes from a Course in Systematic Psychology”, 2 vols., Wapner Papers, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron, Akron. Ohio. [Also at UMich]]