Summer 2007

Daily students pass through Mees Hall and walk by the portrait of the man for whom the hall is named, Carl Leo Mees. His painting holds little immediate relevance to the current Mees Hall residents and their world of classes, projects, pizzas, and instant messaging. However, for students and alumni who passed through the doors of Rose between 1887and 1919, Mees cast a long and impressive shadow. He helped shape and expand the project-based curriculum laid down by CharlesThompson, the first Rose president, and he had a great role in ensuring the importance of integrating theory with application.

The son of a Lutheran minister who emigrated from Germany, C. Leo Mees (as he signed his name) was born and reared in Columbus, Ohio in 1853. Mees graduated from Columbus High School where he was assistant to his physics teacher, Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, who became Rose’s second president in 1887. Mees claimed it was Mendenhall who inspired him to study chemistry and physics. In 1871, he earned a B.S. degree from what became Ohio State University, again studying under Mendenhall, who had become OSU’s first professor. He entered Starling Medical College (later to become part of OSU) and took the medical and the chemistry curricula in parallel, graduating with an M.D. in 1875, never to practice medicine.

Mees’s most significant scientific work began at Starling where he was mentored by Dr. Thomas Wormley, an international expert on poisons. Mees worked with Wormley in perfecting methods for the detection and identification of human blood and tissues in suspected murder cases. He was the first to succeed in photographing different kinds of blood for comparison and exhibition to juries.

He left the world of poisons and forensics in 1875 to become professor of chemistry and physics at the University of Louisville. Beginning in 1880, he invested two years in post-graduate work, first at Frederick William University of Berlin, where he studied under physicist Herman Helmholtz, famed for his theory of electroand thermodynamics, and later at the Royal College of Science (now Imperial College of London), where he studied under England’s foremost microbiologist and physicist, John Tyndall.

Returning to America, his formal education completed (in 1893 the Board conferred upon him the Ph.D.), Mees spent 1882-1887 as professor of physical science at Ohio University before coming to Rose in the fall of 1887 as adjunct professor of physics (the department consisting of himself and the new President Mendenhall). After Mendenhall left Rose in 1889, Mees served as acting president for a year, until President Henry Eddy arrived. With Eddy’s departure four years later, Mees again became acting president and, the following year (1895) entered into the presidency in his own right, a post he was to fill until his retirement in 1919.

It fell to Mees to lead the school through America’s worst recession prior to the Great Depression. Enrollment fell and income from the endowment, meant to be sufficient to operate the school (with free tuition for Vigo County students) decreased while costs rose. He was able to keep the school afloat and never wavered from the Rose mission of providing a first class engineering education. He took as his responsibility to be the kind but strict father for the Rose family, not unlike Dr. Hulbert. Dr. John Peddle, former student and long-time professor, wrote that “…perhaps it was the preacher in him which gave him a personal interest in the salvation of each boy.”

He would use his own funds to keep a good student in school, ‘loans’ rarely remembered or repaid. Students having a hard time buying textbooks or covering an unexpected lab equipment breakage would come to him. Once, when a student considered to be lacking in self-discipline went to Chicago for a good time, Mees got on a train and brought him back, such was the nature of the sense of ‘in loco parentis’ in those days.

He took it upon himself to write the first history of Rose, entitled Rose Polytechnic Institute Memorial Volume, in 1909. Mees took a major role in our first capital campaign in 1916 to raise the $150,000 needed for the planned new campus, to be built on land purchased from the Hulman family. He traveled throughout the country speaking to alumni chapters about the need for the new campus and labs. The exertion of the campaign no doubt contributed to his being granted a leave for health reasons for the 1916-17 academic year.

Mees returned to his duties to see Rose through the strains of World War I – the elimination holidays and vacations and advancing the June 1918 graduation to January to help the boys being called up for wartime military needs. The curriculum was expanded to cover topics of vital need to the Army including ballistics and communications. The school, provided at the request of the War Department, specialized training for selected troops. The demands for housing strained Institute resources as never before (but did add needed revenue). In all 400+ men were housed and received special coursework and 30 percent of alumni served in the military.

In July of 1919, the war effort was history and Mees, now in his 67th year, tendered his resignation. His health was failing. He wrote to the faculty stating one last time his educational philosophy that methods must be continually examined, that content must reflect the best of the various disciplines “…but integrated from the experience and views of many as forth in educations societies, discussed in learned and professional association.” The Rose faculty in 2007 still embody that philosophy.

He died in his 80th year, April 19, 1932 at his residence. School was dismissed so students, alumni, and Institute employees might attend the services, also held at his home. President Donald Prentice and Dr. John White escorted his body to Columbus, Ohio for burial.