Henry Reining; Public Administration Educator

Henry Reining, retired dean of the USC School of Public Administration, an inveterate traveler to exotic places on three continents for both the United States and the United Nations and a consultant to state and local government commissions, died Wednesday at a West Los Angeles hospital.

Reining, who retired in 1973 as dean of the school he helped shape, had continued to teach until earlier this year. He was 81 and suffered from cancer.

A graduate of the University of Akron who worked in that city in a tire factory as a boy, Reining earned a doctorate in politics at Princeton in 1932, the same year he joined the USC faculty as an assistant professor in a unique new School of Public Administration, formed out of public demand.

Filled a Need

“In 1926,” Reining said in an interview six decades after the fact, “a group of Southern California men, all city managers . . . went to Dr. (Rufus B. ) von KleinSmid (USC’s president) and said, ‘You don’t have a school for us.’ ”

The field of public administration was so new that programs across the country were being run by linguists and historians because of a lack of qualified professors.

The USC school was to become the largest in the country, both in terms of students and number of courses offered, but Reining had left in 1934 to teach at Princeton.

The following year he moved to Washington to help establish a public service training program for the Rockefeller Foundation and then spent the next 10 years as educational director of the National Institute of Public Affairs.

In 1943 he began the first of his overseas missions with a trip to Brazil under an assistance program instituted by Nelson A. Rockefeller. From that program came the U.S. Agency of International Development.

Reining said the trip, a three-day journey by DC-3 to Rio de Janeiro, made him “a global citizen.”

For the next several years he traveled to Pakistan, the Philippines, Venezuela (where he set up a town government similar to one he fashioned in Nevada) and other far-flung spots.

In 1947 he returned to the USC faculty. While dean and professor there he also became a founding member of the National Academy of Public Administration, national president of the American Society for Public Administration, chairman of the National Assn. of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration and a member of the board of the Western Governmental Research Assn.

Reining, survived by two sons, two daughters and seven grandchildren, also had been a consultant to the state Assembly and chairman of the Los Angeles city and county charter commissions.

Despite all the commissions and all the travel, his primary devotion remained to the classroom.

“I have been teaching 54 years,” he said in 1986, “and I love it.”

A funeral service is scheduled today at 2 p.m. at Inglewood Park Cemetery.

Henry Reining