Herman Schnieder
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Herman Schneider is the person who founded cooperative education at the University of Cincinnati. His idea was that industry had the best equipment, and that it was very expensive for the University of Cincinnati to purchase equipment that would quickly become outdated. Further, there was the expense of maintaining the building. He surmised that it would take four or more years for a student trained in engineering to become familiar with an employer's needs. Then there was industrial, mechanical and civil engineering.
Schneider was unable to get those at the University of Pittsburgh to accept his ideas, for he was only an assistant professor. He wrote an article about cooperative engineering, which Charles William Dabney, who was recently appointed University President read. Concurrently Schneider came to Dabney, and wanted to earn a masters or a PhD in order that people would listen to him. Dabney had come from Tennessee, and he had a similar idea that wanted to propose in the Ag School. He was impressed with Schneider's depth of thinking and told him that he did not need additional degrees, he simply needed to be Dean. Thus, he asked Schneider to be patient, for there would soon be a position open. Shortly, the original dean resigned, and Schneider was appointed in his place. The value was that the engineering school, which had entered into cooperative arrangements with what was to become Milicron, and several other tool and die shops, would hire these men, teach them to use the equipment and then try to design better equipment. For their work they were paid, but the school now could teach twice as many students - giving them the mathematics, drawing, physics, etc, that they would need, and then they would go out and work x months and implement their ideas. The industries liked this because they got engineers upon graduation who could start immediately in solving their problems. Further, they knew that these men would probably keep working on the problem that they had uncovered while they were working at their shops, for which they didn't have to pay- The latter was not advertised, but could be predicted if one picked people who had an engineering mind. Cincinnati had a large number of men trained in Germany, who also were able to design or improve machines. Cincinnati was in the business of making the machine that would make the machine.
Schneider worked hard at his Deanship, but Frederick L. Hicks succeeded Dabney when he left in 1920. A number of similar efforts in fields that would benefit from practical combined with academic work - now called internships - were presented to Schneider. When Hicks left, there was considerable angst. Hicks had been dean of Commerce (Business) and they understood each other's goals. After some persuasion, Schneider became the interim President of the University, reluctantly, be he set to doing the same kind of forward thinking that he had done with Engineering. Times were harder, and the University did not pay very much. Several men looked at the job but saw it as a municipal university, not very highly ranked, and left. Therefore, Schneider finally took the job and was president of the University for several years.
The story of Schneider's ascendancy to the Deanship comes from the unpublished autobiography of Charles William Dabney, which is available for reading in the Archies and Rare Books Library at Blegen Hall. The story of the politics and travails of higher order academic politics is contained in the typed minutes of the Board of Directors of the University which also can be read in that same library, providing that you don't take anything in to the library and that you leave your driver's license with the library clerk.
