Most of McConnell's academic career was spent in the psychology department at the University of Michigan, where he was a professor from 1963 through his retirement in 1988.

This, he said, created problems with librarians returning the Journal to the publisher with the complaint that it was improperly bound.

He was prone to making provocative statements, believed that memory was chemically based and that in the future humanity would be programmed by drugs.

In 1985, he suffered hearing loss when a bomb, disguised as a manuscript, was opened at his house by his research assistant Nicklaus Suino.

McConnell died of a heart attack at St. Joseph's Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1990.