Central Ohio Technical College (COTC) and The Ohio State University at Newark, which began operations in 1957, have shared a unique and enduring partnership since 1971, when COTC gained its charter. 

The Newark “Branch,” as it was first known, was The Ohio State University’s first off-campus, two-year accredited program. Classes were held in Newark High School until the first building on the new 155-acre Newark campus was opened in 1968 as the permanent location for The Ohio State University at Newark. During the later part of the 1960s, educational leaders, both on the Newark campus and in the area’s public schools, experienced an increasing number of people wished to take advantage of curricula for which neither the university’s baccalaureate programs nor the vocational schools were ideally suited. After conducting a thorough study of the needs of the district, the Board of Trustees submitted the official plan for the creation of the Central Ohio Technical Institute on Jan. 26, 1971, and received its charter from the Ohio Board of Regents on Feb. 19, 1971, as well as a new name — Central Ohio Technical College.

Without exception, everywhere in Ohio where a technical college was sharing facilities with a university regional campus, there was strife between the two. We began immediately to structure a workable arrangement that would make it possible for the two institutions to occupy the same campus with peace and respect.

Robert A. Barnes, Director of Ohio State Newark, 1968–1979, and President of Central Ohio Technical College, 1971–1979

Believing collegiate technical education to be an integral part of higher education, the Board of Trustees of COTC envisioned a partnership between COTC and Ohio State Newark. Board Chairman J. Gilbert Reese wrote a detailed “Cost-Sharing Plan” for the two institutions describing the cooperative relationship ​and specifying a cost-sharing plan by which the costs of operating the Newark campus would be shared by both COTC and Ohio State Newark. The agreement was signed by the boards of trustees of both Ohio State and COTC on May 7, 1971, and by the Ohio Board of Regents on July 29, 1971.

At that time, Robert A. Barnes, PhD, director of Ohio State Newark, was given the additional appointment as chief administrator of COTC. This and subsequent administrative appointments in 1971 provided the two separate institutions with their own governing boards, but one shared chief administrator. From 1971 until 2004, leadership of the campus was a cost-shared position with the COTC president also serving as The Ohio State University at Newark dean and director. Upon the resignation of COTC’s fourth cost-shared president, the COTC president and Ohio State Newark dean/director became separate positions to lead the institutions, each committed to retaining the cost-shared partnership that flourishes still today, 55 years after its inception.