Probably the most widely known and most innovative police chief in American police history, August Vollmer (1876-1955) had been Marshal of Berkeley (1905-1909) the first Police Chief of Berkeley (1909-1932) and Professor of Police Administration at the University of California at Berkeley (1932-1937), and was widely sought as a consultant in police administration. He was physically an imposing person (6'4" tall and weighing about 190 lbs.) who always seemed to be in top physical condition. He was a broadly informed and creative man with a contagious enthusiasm for making police work a profession with a highly trained core of persons who had college degrees and who could teach at the college level. As early as 1916, Vollmer, in collaboration with law professor Alexander Marsden Kidd, developed a summer session program in criminology at the Berkeley campus in which courses were given from 1916 to 1931, with the exception of the 1927 session. It was Vollmer and Kidd who in 1928 proposed the establishment of a school of criminology, a proposal that led in 1931 to criminology course in the regular school year sessions at the University of California at Berkeley, the development of a major in criminology in 1933, a Bureau of Criminology in the Department of Political Science in 1939, a Master's program in Criminology in 1947, and the establishment of the nation's first and only formally designated university "School of Criminology" in 1950. (quoted from The American Society of Criminology: A History, 1941 - 1974 by Albert Morris in Criminology, August 1975)
