Educated, But Not Credentialed

There is a phrase I've been increasingly encountering on the internet that goes "credentialed but not educated."  I twisted the title of this post from that.

Credentialed-not-educated refers to the increasingly sorry state of college and university graduates in this country, people holding diplomas who have about the same level of intellectuals skills and background they had when entering.  Not true for all graduates by any means, but frequent enough to be worrisome.

I won't rant on that here.  Instead, I'll deal with a man whose formal education ended with high school: John Cullen Murphy (1919-2004), Wikipedia entry here.  He is best known for his comic strip Big Ben Bolt and for continuing for decades the Prince Valiant strip created by Hal Foster.  Murphy is the subject of a fascinating recent book by his son.

It turns out that John Cullen Murphy was an impressive man. He was good at portraiture even in his mid-20s, could have made a good career in commercial illustration had he not been diverted into the comic strip trade, and was knowledgeable and sophisticated even though his academic education ended with high school. As for the latter point, it's further proof that real education can happen once one has left school -- provided one has the will and wits to learn on one's own.

Murphy was raised in New Rochelle, New York, in the county immediately north of New York City. Nearby lived famous illustrators J.C. Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell. Rockwell even used teen-aged Murphy as the subject of a Saturday Evening Post cover (shown in the book). During World War 2 he was attached to Douglas MacArthur's staff and remained friends with Mrs. MacArthur (whose portrait he painted) for many years thereafter.