Chapter 3: An Academic Firmament; Episode 1: Coming Home

Penang Bridge with a view of USM Campus in the background

I came home to Malaysia and reported for duty in USM on September 19, 1973, nineteen days after three years from the day I signed the ASTS contract with the university.  In September 1985, nineteen days short of thirteen years later, I tendered my resignation.  In that time was a period of academic firmament, from the twenty-seventh year of my life to my fortieth.  During those years, it was like I went through a wormhole, travelling beyond the speed of light, to come out on the other side into another universe.  I think I survived, and therefore I am.

Just before that, Rose and I had travelled at much slower terrestrial speed through Western Europe on a Eurail Pass in the month straddling the last day of summer and the start of fall 1973.  From Philadelphia, we had stopped in London for a couple of days before the start of our deserved summer holiday, staying with Raja Lope and Monica in their Seven Oaks flat.  That evening we were joined by Malek Merican who was on the way to taking up an executive director’s job at the World Bank, whom I would later interact with in my MIER years when he was, after leaving the Treasury, the managing director of Azman Hashim’s Arab Malaysia Merchant Bank.  Leaving by train from London, and the ferry (before the advent of the Eurotunnel) across the English Channel, we travelled on to Paris.  From the Gare du Nord the next day we took the train, with very light luggage, all the way to Oslo, via Aarhus in Denmark to view the Tollund Man (peat bog mummy) just due west in Silkenberg.  Then we worked our way down Western Europe via Stockholm, Warsaw (to visit the Dachau concentration camp), Munich, Vienna (and the famous Schloss Schoenenborg Palace), Zurich and Geneva (for a mountain train up the Jungfrau) and back to Paris.  We flew back to Kuala Lumpur from London, with a planned stopover in New Delhi, where we were joined by Tatsu (Kawashima) to visit the Taj Mahal.  There was a bit of a scare when, stopping at an Indian village along the way and walking through a row of shops, Rose was mobbed by children who were reaching out to touch her.  There was a further bit of drama at Delhi airport the day we planned to resume our flight back to KL, when we were stopped at the check-in counter for lack of an up-to-date health certificate.  Negotiating with Indian bureaucracy for the first time, we managed to get a friendly doctor to certify us, and finally arrived Subang a day later to the relief of our families waiting to welcome us home.

USM Campus with Georgetown in the background

I had been in communication with USM about my responsibilities at the start of my career in the university.  Having notified the Registrar that I had obtained my Ph.D, Zambri Mohammed, the assistant registrar wrote to inform me of my attachment to the Geography Department in the School of Humanities, and responding to my inquiry said the university was just about to establish a Centre for Policy Research under KJ Ratnam, who was then the founding dean of the School of Social Sciences.  I really got quite excited by the latter news and the prospect of undertaking policy research on regional development in Malaysia.  George Elliston, senior lecturer and head of the geography department had followed up on an earlier communication about what courses I could offer, confirming that I was down to teach the geographic theory course for final year students majoring in geography.  

I was about three weeks late into the new term by the time I arrived in the USM Minden campus.  News of my coming back already had spread to the students, some of whom were in the first batch of mature students who had come on campus for the final year of their off-campus program.  I was walking towards the Arts lecture theatre complex and passing in front of the geography building where Elliston was conducting a class for the same said students, when as I was stopped to be introduced to Lim Teck Ghee, a historian and Yahya Ismail, who had returned from Monash earlier, I heard a shout and turned towards the geography classroom only to see a group of students waving towards me in greeting.   Only later did I learn that when these students asked George how I looked like, he had told them of the character Dr. Zhivago, played by Omar Sharif.  Much flattered, I had hoped that they had not been disappointed.  That first class I taught on returning home actually went on well (from my perspective that is).  I went on for the rest of the academic year to offer in the first quarter of 1974 a course on regional development in the second term, including an off-campus course in geography.  I was also involved and got to know the students in the graduating class of 1974 even better through the geography field excursion to Grik during the term break at the end of 1973.  And thus, that was how I quickly settled into the swing of academic life in USM.

USM was the second university to be established in Malaysia in 1969, ten years after University of Malaya was established in Kuala Lumpur after having been located in Singapore for the good part of its early history.  The seventies would see the growth of three more universities and the continued expansion of MARA Institute of Technology, which would later be upgraded to a university in 2006.  USM’s establishment was the beginning of a dramatic expansion of tertiary education after the May 13th incident and the introduction of the New Economic Policy, whose principal aim was to restructure society to reduce the identification of race with economic activity and location and to eradicate poverty regardless of race as a program of social engineering (affirmative action) to uplift the economic status of the “bumiputera” (“sons of the soil”) who formed the majority of the population.  The foundation stone of USM was laid down in Sg. Dua on Penang Island in 1967 by the then Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman.   After initially being housed at the Malaysian Teachers Training College in Gelugor, the university was eventually sited in the former British army Minden Barracks.

Hamzah Sendut, 1927-1996.
USM's First Vice Chancellor

The formative years of the university were led by Hamzah Sendut, an urban planner and chair of the geography department in University of Malaya before he was tapped as USM’s first Vice Chancellor.  I had known him by reputation even when I was still in sixth form in RMC.  An excellent academic leader, terse and correct by personal standing, he had gathered together a team of senior academicians to constitute an Academic Planning Board, later to become the Senate of the university, to plan for the new university, representing various disciplines with emphasis on science and technology as befit the university’s name.  The ratio of students was set at 60:40 between science and the arts and social science.  The university was structured according to a school system to differentiate it from the traditional faculty/department organization found in University of Malaya.  This was meant to allow cross-disciplinary integration, particularly important for the School of Humanities and the School of Social Sciences.  The university also pioneered the establishment of an off-campus (distance education) program for mature students involving the sciences and humanities and social sciences.  Returning home and being assigned to geography department, which was located in the School of Humanities, meant that I was straddling, given my training, an artificial divide with the social sciences.  This situation was duly corrected when I was moved to the School of Comparative Social Sciences two years later.  But that situation did not really matter at the start of my career as an academic was concerned.

I didn’t get to see the Vice Chancellor before I left for Penn in 1970 to undertake my graduate studies.  On my return and settling into the university, I now paid him a courtesy call.  As I had my early training in geography and later in regional science, Hamzah Sendut must have seen in me a kindred spirit.  He was very pleasant at that first meeting and extended a degree of welcome to a brash young PhD at the start of his academic career that sat incongruously against the gap in length and depth of experience of a senior academic leader at the top of his game.  I was impressed and respectful, and I sensed his reciprocity.  I knew he expected much from me, being the first few Malay lecturers with a PhD in the university at that early stage of the implementation of the New Economic Policy.  But Hamzah was an academic leader drawn towards excellence, and a firm believer in the traditions of an institution of higher learning, including the principles of peer review and academic freedom.  At the parting of our first encounter, he put things in the correct perspective for me, though I did not see its significance at the time, when he opined that I should avoid from “becoming a demagogue”.  Confusing at first whether he said demagogue or demigod, I later realized what he, wise as he was, meant.  As events later unfolded, the potential to think oneself in “masters of the universe” mode was ever present in my career.  As it turned out eventually later, politics would overcome academic values long defended, to the detriment of the institution’s integrity.

None of that I foresaw at the time I was settling comfortably into the academy, and outside life in general.  Campus life was as I expected, having grown into it during my seven and a half years of university overseas, with colleagues drawn from all over the world.  Thrown into this cosmopolitan milieu was a mix of academic talent mostly trained overseas, scientists pure and applied, and technology experts including the new computer science, teachers in fine arts and the performing arts, and mass communication, beside the traditional humanities and social science subject specialists.  There was in USM in those early years a heady cauldron of the old and young, and an air of innovativeness and exploration in knowledge that was a potent brew for academic achievement.  C.P. Ramachandran (in biology), Chatar Singh (physics), Frances Morsingh (chemistry), Augustine Ong (chemistry), Tan Huan Seng (mathematics), Sharom Ahmat (historian), Don Blake (economics) and KJ Ratnam (political science) provided the pioneering leadership class, supported by later famous names that came out of USM:  for example, Lee Beck Sim in theoretical physics who worked with Abdus Salam, Shahnon Ahmad and Yahya Ismail in literature, Chandra Muzaffar in political science, Lim Tech Ghee in history, and Chew Teng Beng, Piyadasa and Latif Mohidin in fine arts.  In quick time USM grew in reputation ready to challenge University of Malaya, just ten years after its establishment.  This achievement, in no small measure, was due to the late Hamzah Sendut.

The university’s standing would be further enhanced by the establishment of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in 1974 and the work of a group of academics under the leadership of KJ Ratnam which made its mark throughout the mid-70s and 80s.   CPR was the first think tank in the country providing a direct link between academia and the government through research on issues such as poverty, ethnic relations, urban and rural development.  Previously, much research underlying the country’s development planning were undertaken by foreign consultants and advisors especially from the World Bank and Harvard academics.   With his contacts in the government, such as Ghazali Shafiee who was then heading the National Unity Department, Rama Iyer (SERU) and Robless in the EPU, and sitting on the newly-formed National Advisory Council on National Unity, Ratnam saw the importance of indigenizing the sources of knowledge and understanding of the country’s development problems, and in policy formulation and nation-building after the tragic experience of 1969.  His book, published out of his doctoral work on communalism in Malaysia, was the one which Tun Razak misread as “communism” as he was handing the book prize for Government to me during Prize Day in RMC in 1965.

I was quite eager to learn about the CPR.  Not long after my return from overseas, I sought out KJ (as he was popularly known) at the time he was two years away from stepping down from the social science deanship to focus full-time as head of the institute.   At last I met the man behind the name and reputation; KJ was a senior academic at the University of Singapore (previously the University of Malaya in Singapore), and had been promoted to professor of political science when he was just 30, during the time of the rise of Lee Kuan Yew.  That first meeting led to a professional relationship throughout the NEP era in which the CPR featured significantly.  And a life-long friendship.

In early 1974, a two-men team led by a Kawashima (not my friend Tatsu) from the United Nations Centre for Regional Development in Nagoya, Japan, visited USM and met with the Vice Chancellor. They were looking for collaboration for a comparative study on city functions in Asia including Malaysia.  The other member was Fu-chen Lo, who graduated in regional science from Penn in 1968 the year before I arrived.  Fu-chen later told me that Hamzah Sendut informed them of a high-flyer in regional science who he highly recommended could collaborate with UNCRD to undertake the Malaysian case study.  This was a most welcomed development for me, and it was to become a long-term involvement with UNCRD headed by Masahiko Honjo, and the start of a substantial collaborative and personal relationship between me and Fu-chen for the next fifteen years.  That study was also the basis of my first involvement in policy research in Malaysia as a contribution to the Third Malaysia Plan, an involvement sustained over the following forty years of my career and well into my retirement.

When we arrived in Penang we settled in a rented house in Minden Heights, a housing estate just next door to the Minden campus.  Rose got herself a job as personnel manager in Hitachi Semiconductor company in the Bayan Lepas Free Trade Zone which was a major agglomeration for multinational companies in the electronic and semiconductor industry, attracted by generous federal government incentives and facilities provided by the Penang State government.  The ready availability of workers, especially female, drawn from the surrounding rural areas on the island and the mainland provided additional economies that led to the growth of Penang and Malaysia in the 70s and well into the 80s as a world-leading production and export platform for semiconductor and electronics products.  A year later we moved to Island Glades, a suburb further down and away on Green Lane from the campus.  And in November 1974 our first son, Anwar, arrived.  We had a second son, Shafril Hadi, later in 1979, but much more were to happen in the five years between.

Chapter 3, Episode 2 Year of Living Dangerously.  Read it HERE.