Chapter 3: An Academic Firmament Episode 2: Year of Living Dangerously

On November 19, 1974, more than 1,000 rubber smallholders and farmers demonstrated in Baling, Kedah, over falling rubber prices and rising cost of essential food items such as sugar and flour.  The demonstrations went on for another two days.  And grew by the third day to more than 13,000. They demanded that the government announce measures to alleviate the suffering of the people within 10 days.  When the deadline expired with no response from the government, on December 1 about 30,000 people massed and marched through Baling to show their growing frustration.  When students from the University of Malaya and ITM started their own demonstration on their campuses in sympathy with the plight of the villagers, the police moved in with tear gas to breakup the protest.  Anwar Ibrahim and Ibrahim Ali were among the leaders of this student demonstration.

Baling Demonstration 1974

On the USM campus that same weekend, the students led by Fatimah Sham and Ahmad Kamal Selamat started their own demonstration. There were gatherings of students and staff outside the Arts lecture theatre and earlier on in the day down at the padang just inside the main gate.  Later, a public forum was organized in Lecture Theatre A in which Musa Hitam spoke on behalf of the government.  At the USM demonstration, Chandra Muzaffar, a student favourite, and I spoke on behalf of the staff association.  Later Fu-chen Lo, who was no stranger to such protests having played a big part in the sixties leading demos for the Independent Taiwan Movement in front of the UN Headquarters in New York, would tell me that he was there during the speeches, which coincided with his visit to USM with Kawashima.  He had not met me yet, but observing the USM student demonstrations that day from afar, he had flashbacks to the danger of the moment with the red FRU trucks lined up just inside the gate.  In the early morning the next day, armed with a list, the police arrested many student leaders and some lecturers, including Anwar Ibrahim and Ibrahim Ali, under the ISA for disrupting public order.  I was not on that arrest list, but Rashidah had rushed to my house that morning to bring me news of the arrests, and to see if I was safe.  This event alone ushered in the beginning of the end of the era of free speech on campuses and the beginning of government supervision of student and university life on campus through the introduction of the University and University Colleges Act (UUCA).

About six months earlier, having completed two terms of teaching in my first academic year 1973/74, I was elected president of the USM Academic and Administrative Staff Association, with Chandra Muzaffar as secretary general.  Among the committee members were Lim Teck Ghee, Chee Kim Loy, and David Gibbons, all of whom were to play big roles in CPR’s growing reputation and influence.  The task of the staff association was clear, but in this particular year was pointedly most significant.  The new Minister of Education, Dr. Mahathir Mohammed had just assumed office, after retaking the Kubang Pasu parliamentary seat in 1974 general elections which he had lost in 1969.   He (together with Musa Hitam who were dubbed the Malay ultras), was sacked from UMNO in the intervening years after writing an open letter calling for the resignation of the then President of UMNO and Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, for failing to uplift the economic status of the dominant largely rural Malays.  During that time in the political wilderness, he wrote the controversial Malay Dilemma book, which looked into the economic backwardness of the Malays. Although he admitted later that he was wrong in pinpointing heredity as the root cause, the book provided an urgency to the formulation of the New Economic Policy in 1970 under the premiership of Tun Abdul Razak who had by then replaced the Tunku.  Mahathir was brought back into UMNO by Tun Razak, and stood for and won his old Kubang Pasu seat in the 1974 general elections.   Among his first mission was to deal with the restless student body on the expanding campuses, leading to the initiation of the UUCA.   

Simultaneously, the government was also reviewing the salaries and terms of service of statutory bodies which included the universities through the setting up of the Harun Commission.  The USM staff association banded together with the UM, UKM and ITM counterparts under the leadership of Tengku Shamsul Baharin, a senior geographer and President of the UM staff union (the only academic staff body unionized) to provide a united front in the ongoing negotiations.  The objective of the government was to align the salaries and service schemes of the statutory bodies with that of the combined diplomatic and domestic civil service.  Realizing the need to take a common stand and sensing the threat to academic freedom, representatives of the academic staff associations decided to formulate an Academic Charter as a self-governing code of conduct for academics and to form a combined academic staff union called Tenaga Academik among the institutions of higher learning.  I with Chandra represented USM on the drafting committee for both the charter and the proposed national union’s constitution. This initiative turned out to be just a rearguard action, and the Tenaga Academik’s application for registration as a union was turned down by the government.

K.J. Ratnam

The confluence of politics and the academy were to define much of my professional life throughout my career.  Within less than a year of returning home, I found myself rising fast on the learning curve.  I had to adjust rather quickly to this challenge.  Towards the end of the second term of 1973/74, and my first full academic year, Sharom Ahmat took over as Dean of the School of Humanities, and I was made his deputy.  By then I was already committed to associating with the work of the CPR, as KJ Ratnam was consolidating the work of the centre. Knowing of my special interest and expertise in regional development, and the fact that CPR was already undertaking a major study of the socio-economic impact of the MADA agriculture scheme in Kedah, Malaysia’s rice bowl, KJ asked me to join him early in 1974 to a meeting of researchers undertaking a comparative case study of regional development amongst four countries, namely Bicol (the Phillipines), South Sumatra (Indonesia), Northeast Thailand and Nepal, funded by the International Development Research Council (IDRC) of Canada.  Held in Bali, that was the first time I met Prod Laquian, the regional representative of IDRC, and a few other academics including Soechipto Sugiyanto (Sugi) who will join with me and Fu-chen in UNCRD in Nagoya in June the next year for the city functions project.  IDRC was going to play a major role in sponsoring some of my future research activities, during the years I was in MIER.  

It was on transit in Jakarta on our return home from Bali that I was reunited with my sister, Rokiah, who had settled in Jakarta and married her senior in Ehya after completing her studies in Jogjakarta. She had three children.   Bang Jalaluddin had opened a shop in Pasar Minggu, an urban village on the way to the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport.  I had no clue about her address but ventured anyway to look for her, just going by referring to her local designation as “Ibu Malaysia”.  It was dark when with the help of a local passerby in Pasar Minggu I stumbled onto her house, and wanting to surprise her entered without immediately introducing myself.  After much quizzical but polite looks, I finally identified myself.  It was a wonderful tearful reunion with my sister whom I had not seen nor heard from for nearly fifteen years since the death of my mother.  I told her about our family, where everyone was, and my reunion with our youngest brother Munar.  Munar came to stay with me for a while on my return, but he had taken a job during the years of my US stint, as a cook on one of the MISC palm oil tankers and travelling to Yokohama, the west coast of the US as well as south America.  He said he was in the happiest period of his life to be able to travel overseas and seeing foreign places just like his own brother had.

Not much later after that, I was invited to Canberra for the fall annual meeting of the Australian Association of Geographers (AAG), where I met Terry McGee, a famous urban geographer specializing in Southeast Asian urbanization, who wrote the book, Southeast Asian City.  That was the start of a long professional association I had with Terry in the following two decades.   That AAG meeting also offered a reunion with some of the Melbourne academics such as Geoff Missen, a colleague of Geoff Robinson, and Peter Rimmer whom I knew of when I was at Monash, and some other geographers including Brookefield and Gavin Jones at the Research School of Pacific Studies at ANU.  It was on this occasion that I first met Mei Ling Young who was starting out on her PhD studies in demography under Gavin Jones.  Alaric Maude from Adelaide who became a firm friend later had reminded the small gathering at the dinner reception in Terry McGee’s house following the seminar that he had learned of my reputation from the IRGR article on goal-conflicts in regional-national development planning that was just published prior to the Australian meeting.

From the safe distance of an academic conference overseas, a calm would settle over the frenetic pace of life in an academic fast lane.  Over the years in USM before my eventual departure, being invited to present papers at professional meetings or to take part in international scientific activities gave me the opportunity to keep up with scholastic developments in my field, travelling to exotic places and meeting up with colleagues from all over the world, away from the hustle of academic life at home.  This is part of the joy of being an academic.  I kept up my teaching duties as best I could.  At the start of the 1974/75 academic year, the start of my second year home, dramatic as it were in the last part of 1974, I decided to take the first year of the geography programme at USM.  I would maintain this focus on the freshman year even when I moved to social science and the new development studies programme, and even after I became deputy vice chancellor, for the importance of reaching out to fresh young minds making that important transition to university life for the first time.  This was my own experience starting as a student in Monash, the senior professors would often take the first year class.  My introductory courses were taken by many students from different faculties, science or arts, including from the School of Housing, Building and Planning (HBP), to fulfill their minor requirements which was the character of the school system implemented in USM.  Such cross-disciplinary learning is typical of the US first degree liberal arts educational structure, but USM as with all the other universities in Malaysia were patterned after the British academic tradition, which required early specialization.  Years later many students from different fields who had left USM and successful in their own careers would come up to me and introduced themselves and acknowledged that they had taken this or that course under me while at the university.  That was thoroughly satisfying for me and so validating.

But, you can take the academy out of politics, but not politics from the academy.  Early in that first term of the new academic year, students from the HBP School demonstrated against their Dean, an English professor named Carrow.  It had nothing to do with ethnic issues but purely academic dissatisfaction.  Ten years later there would be a similar crisis demonstration by USM staff against the university administration.  The HBP incident was considered serious enough to warrant an investigation and a three-person inquiry committee was formed by the university comprising Zulkifli Razak representing the student union, me as representative of the academic staff association, with Raja Azlan Shah, the Pro-Chancellor and at that time not yet the Lord President in the chair.   After a few hearings, we duly wrote the report of findings to the incident, which was eventually resolved.  Shortly after, Carrow would resign his deanship and left the university, while Zulkifli would complete his pharmacy course, went overseas under the ASTS scheme, and returned to join the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, the first pharmacy programme in the country.  Zulkifli would later in 2004 become the fifth vice-chancellor of USM.

While the year 1974 ended dramatically with the Baling demonstrations, that year was the first time I met with most of the leading dramatis personae of Malaysian politics, especially UMNO politics in the unfolding events over the coming years.  I first met Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in a forum in the multipurpose hall in front of the USM Gelugor campus; he was then director of youth in the Ministry of Youth and Sports.  Musa Hitam I had met earlier in Monash in 1967, now again in the USM forum on Baling.  I also met Hussein Onn in 1968 when he was Minister of Education and received the recommendation of a Bumiputera economic congress in University of Malaya for the setting up of UKM.  I was back then for my BA thesis fieldwork. Anwar Ibrahim came to Penang to participate in a Merdeka forum earlier in 1974 on Mahathir’s book while still in his final year of Islamic studies at UM, and at the time when ABIM was being formed by Sanusi Junid and him together with other friends.  He had befriended and kept up Mahathir’s profile in the campus during the wilderness years, and of course led the Baling demonstrations at the end of 1974.  While I had missed meeting Mahathir when he visited Monash in 1971, I came face to face for the first time one morning in KL with the man who would have the most profound impact on the country’s politics and development.  KJ, who had interviewed Mahathir some years earlier, and I had just returned from a meeting with Taib Mahmud, then minister in charge of SERU headed by Rama Iyer, and found him sitting alone in the café of the Federal Hotel.  He returned our greeting in a somber fashion, as if still nursing a soreness at being expelled from UMNO.  He was to return with a vengeance after winning in the 1974 elections.  On one of my trips to KL, and staying at the old Holiday Inn on the Park, I ran into Ghaffar Baba, a grand old man of UMNO, then associated with Dunlop and chairman of Pegi Malaysia.   Finally, in 1976 there was Tengku Razaleigh, who was then Minister of Finance in the Razak Administration, whom I met at the first dialogues with industry and academia representatives that became a tradition in subsequent administrations.  

I would become involved with each and everyone of them in some capacity or other during the next four decades as the year of living dangerously passed into the night over the Minden campus.


Chapter 3: An Academic Firmament Episode 3: In the Academic Fast Lane