A Global Citizen in Public Affairs : USC Professor Travels World but True Love Is Teaching

In a lifetime that spans most of this century, Henry Reining’s world has changed dramatically from an Ohio mill town to a global community.

He has progressed from a teen-age job in an Akron tire factory to international missions on three continents for the United States and the United Nations.

He earned a Ph.D. in politics at Princeton University and pioneered as professor and dean in an embryonic academic field, public administration. He has been a consultant to private industry and federal, state and local governments. He has organized town rule in places as disparate as Nevada and Venezuela and served on charter commissions for both Los Angeles County and City.

He has puzzled over how to teach public administration in a country that had no word in its language for such a thing as public service. He has bounced around South America in a small plane with Indian farm workers--indentured, even in the 20th Century--and their families, including goats and chickens.

But Henry Reining’s true love has always been the job he has had in one form or another for 54 years: teaching.

He recalled his half-century-plus career in his compact office in the Von KleinSmid Center at USC, where he joined the faculty in 1932 as an assistant professor in its new, and at the time unique, School of Public Administration.

It was an exciting and creative time, said Reining, who eventually became dean of the school that came into being only 50 years after Woodrow Wilson wrote an article on public administration, “the first evidence . . . that it would become an academic discipline.”

Reining reviewed the origins of public administration instruction at the university level.

“The New York Bureau of Public Research found no municipal experts to run a training program it had begun and transferred it to Syracuse University in 1924,” Reining said. That the program was run by a professor of German indicated the dearth of expertise in public administration: “It remained a program and wisely stayed small.

“In 1926 a group of Southern California men, all city managers except a Chamber of Commerce man, went to Dr. (Rufus B.) von KleinSmid (USC president). They said, ‘You don’t have a school for us.’ ”

Von KleinSmid saw their point and called in Emory Olson of the business school, called at that time the College of Commerce. Olson tried a few nonformal classes.

“The school moved ahead quite rapidly,” Reining said. “It is an eclectic field--political science, economics, business. On the undergraduate level, political science is really liberal arts--sociology, anthropology, chemistry, psychology.

“We became the largest public administration school in the country, by any measure: number of faculty, number of students and number of courses offered. It has shrunk some now, partly deliberately (on USC’s part), partly because Mr. Reagan has been no help at all, given no support for government people to get additional training.”

Reining, who compares public service to a call to the ministry, left USC to teach at Princeton in 1934, then jumped at the chance to go to Washington the next year to help set up a public service training program backed by a Rockefeller Foundation grant. He spent the next 10 years as educational director of the National Institute of Public Affairs.

Setting Up Institute

His interest in training management-level people led to his involvement in setting up the federal executive institute at Charlottesville, Va., described by Reining as “a place bureau chiefs and higher officers of the military go for three months of training.

“Most of them are rewarded by promotion for their technical ability,” Reining said. “They don’t know management and they haven’t the language of management. They need two things: 1--a frame of reference and 2--a vocabulary. If you can’t talk about something you can’t describe it, can’t improve it.”

Reining’s overseas missions began in 1943 with a trip to Brazil through an international affairs program under Nelson Rockefeller that eventually became the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID).

The trip, a three-day journey by DC-3 from Miami to Rio de Janeiro, was Reining’s debut on the international scene.

Got Him Started

“It got me started on the international world,” he said. “All of a sudden I became a global citizen, and I have not stopped.”

The trip home showed him another aspect of the world, he said.

That was the trip on which he encountered the Indians bound for Bolivia: “They were indentured for 30 years, but they had their whole families with them. There was a goat, and one woman had a pair of chickens on board.”

His second trip to Brazil was a United Nations mission to set up a school in public administration in Rio for all of Latin America. The U.N. paid for representatives of each Latin American nation to attend, plus three American faculty members.

On an AID mission to Pakistan beginning in 1957 Reining set up two academic and four in-service programs in public administration. He has been a consultant to the president of USC and the Secretary of the Interior, to federal, state, county and city commissions, to the Philippines and Venezuela, to an executive search firm in New York and, through a private company established with USC colleagues, to a variety of governmental units.

Two related jobs to set up town governments, one in Nevada and the other in Venezuela, presented Reining with similar but differing challenges.

“In 1949 I became a consultant to the secretary of the Interior on self-government on a federal reservation: Boulder City, Nev.,” Reining said. “A city’s mainstay is its tax base, but a city can’t tax federal land.

“We set up a fiscal base and a very simple plan for local elections, a mayor, council and city clerk. In a small place everybody wears two hats. The city’s police force was minimal, only two or three, because they had federal officers to fall back on.”

The problem in Venezuela arose when a company-owned construction camp became permanent and a burden to the company.

“We were called in to help get rid of the company towns,” Reining said. “I do not wish to demean the companies. They could no longer operate the towns but they knew they couldn’t just turn them loose.

“We set up a Spanish-style form of city government. But the real problem was in training people. We brought in city managers from here as role models and to train people in government administration.

“Then we brought newly elected Venezuelan mayors up here to see how our small cities operated. We did the same thing for a couple of cities in Mexico.”

‘Care and Feeding of Cities’

Reining’s main interest in government, he said, “is the care and feeding of cities.” He spoke first of the Akron in which he grew up--and its survival despite an economy based on heavy industry.

“Akron has changed completely, from a mill town to an international (business) headquarters,” he said. “It has become a well-cultured city. You used to have to go to Cleveland for the theater and the symphony.

“I went back to my 50-year reunion at the University of Akron--there were 169 in my graduating class and now Akron is part of the Ohio state university system. These were the people that headed up this transition . . . the kind of people who will support cultural activities such as the theater or symphony. That is part of the answer to Akron’s success.

“Akron is different from other towns that are dying in that it was known worldwide because of the tire companies. Many of these leaders in Akron also got international experience through the rubber companies, traveled and worked overseas and learned about other places.”

Asked about highlights in his life, Reining couldn’t come up immediately with an answer. He spoke of his career, each incident reminding him of another mission, another challenge, another academic experience. Late in the interview, having spoken also of his family (wife, four adult children), two-mile runs every morning (he is an exceptionally fit 79-year-old), interrupted by three luncheon invitations, he came up with a surprise.

“Sometimes one doesn’t discover until years afterward that something was a highlight,” he said. “I think of the Boy Scouts. I was an Eagle Scout. I had 50 merit badges and each one was a new experience.

“I became assistant scoutmaster. My first experience in bossing people was in the Scouts. And I remember Tom Wilson, who was high in Firestone and was our scoutmaster. I owe him a great deal.”

After private sector work with an executive search firm in New York, Reining returned to USC as a professor in 1947. In 1953 he became dean of the School of Public Administration; in 1967 he was named dean of the Von KleinSmid Center of International and Public Affairs, which included urban and regional planning, international relations and political science, as well as public administration. Since 1973 he has been dean emeritus of the School of Public Administration.

And, after 54 years in education, Reining still teaches three classes. Two are in the doctoral program, a seminar in national development and one in personnel policy; the third is the final course in the master’s program, public organization management, in which 13 of the 14 enrolled are international students.

His conversation ranges broadly: the changes in American life wrought by the New Deal (“People don’t realize the whole impact”), President Reagan and a new book on how he communicates, the frustrations of the academic world (“They are specific, not general”).

But Henry Reining--professor, doctor, dean, in his own words “a global citizen”--returns always to teaching. He offers a final view on his career.

“I have been teaching 54 years . . . and I love it,” he said. “There is a certain satisfaction in teaching that I don’t find in any other form of activity, almost mystical. It makes me feel great.”