The pace of my academic life continued to pick up even after the dust finally settled on the Baling demonstrations. Even with the implementation of the Universities and University Colleges Act, the academics on campus tried to maintain a semblance of normality in their teaching and research work. And with the adoption of the Harun Commission Report, academic terms and conditions of service improved, but the bureaucratization of academia had begun. Over the next five years I managed to strike a balance between teaching, research and administrative work that was typical of the life of an academic. But I had kept up such a pace in these activities that Terry McGee, after five years of my returning to Malaysia worried that I might suffer a premature burn-out if I didn’t slow down. I noted but didn’t heed his advice. Besides teaching young students, the biggest joy for me was the conduct of policy research. And there were plenty of these issues on the table in the first decade of the implementation of the New Economic Policy, which was launched while I was still in training overseas.
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| Official Stamp of the Launch of the Third Malaysia Plan (1976 - 80) |
My life on the academic fast track continued apace. That article on the hyper-surface trend analysis that I was working on with Geoff but could not be completed before I left for the United States, got published in Regional Studies as our second paper for the journal in September 1974. I completed the research on city functions for the UNCRD and presented the Malaysian case study to the meeting in Nagoya in November 1975. At that meeting Fu-chen Lo launched a multi-country Asian case study on my favourite subject, growth poles, intended to compare the experiences of these countries in implementing the strategies to reduce disparities between urban and rural areas. Fu-chen asked me to be the principal co-researcher with him to lead this comparative study. This was where I first met up with John Friedmann of UCLA, a geographer-planner whose center-periphery model were to become the organizing planning framework on regional convergence in development that was the major thrust of Fu-chen’s regional science Ph.D thesis. Fu-chen and I would be involved with Friedmann over the next decade during the evolution towards the development of the ideas around world cities, growth centres and the agropolitan approach to local-level development within this core-periphery model.
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| Fu-chen Lo |
The growth pole and regional development seminar would be held in Nagoya in the fall of 1976, with contributions from development scholars from South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia. This also was the first time I met with Ben Higgins who had been part of the Harvard team conducting research towards the regional development chapter in the Third Malaysia Plan, which he presented as a paper on “Do Development Poles Exist?” based on his research in Pahang Tenggara. My city functions paper as well as the Malaysian case study on the integrated growth centre strategy in Peninsular Malaysia had served as inputs into the same chapter. An-jae Kim and Byong-nak Song presented the South Korean case under the Park regime, which review of the Korean regional development strategies set the stage for the divergence of the Korean experience from the Malaysian case in industrialization over the seventies and eighties. Sugiyanto offered the South Sumatra experience in regional development, and Phisit Pakkasem of the NESDB presented the case study of Thailand’s north-east province. I developed the research framework for this study of growth centres and regional development experience in terms of a multi-level economic policy framework within a global core-periphery model. At the time, the development economics literature was dominated by the writings of scholastic successors to the Lewis model on the dualistic economy such as Ranis and Fei, and Todaro. My contribution was a precursor to later absorption of ideas on the issue of Third World underdevelopment through engagement with dependency theory and the world system approach to explain regional sub-national underdevelopment. But this was a few years further down the road. The results of this seminar on growth center and regional development experience in Asia was eventually published by Pergamon Press later in 1978 under the rubric of Growth Center Strategy and Regional Development Policy in Dualistic Economies: Western Theory and Asian Experience, which would attract considerable interest all over the world.
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| Growth Pole Strategy and Regional Development Policy Fu-cheh Lo and Kamal Salih |
On campus, in 1975 when Sharom Ahmat was elevated to the newly created Deputy Vice Chancellor post for academic affairs, I made a lateral shift to social science to take up the deputy dean’s job when Don Blake was made Dean to replace KJ Ratnam, who went on to head CPR full-time. I was simultaneously also to head the Urban Studies program. This was much more closer to my training and research interest, and would lead to several papers on urbanization and urban poverty. I wrote two papers in quick succession in the middle of 1976: one, on Access and Urban Poverty presented to a seminar organized by the Malaysian Economic Association which was later published as part of a feschrift for Ungku Aziz on the Aetiology of Poverty; and the other, the EAROPH conference paper on estimating the Housing Gap between supply and affordability in the housing market. The first made headlines in Utusan Malaysia the next day, while the housing issue would resurface again more than thirty-five years later in the first UNDP Human Development Report for Malaysia in 2013.
By 1978, I had taken over as Acting Dean when Ansari Nawawi went on sabbatical leave, who had earlier assumed the dean’s post from Blake who retired. During that time I had proposed to the Senate, and a sympathetic Hamdan Tahir the new USM VC supported me , to realign the urban studies programme with rural studies by their merger to become a new, and the first, development studies program in the country. I then had the name of the MPPP-endowed urban studies chair changed to the development studies chair. This led to the formation of the “Penang School” of development studies, a collection of scholars including , Halim Salleh, Hashim Yaacob, Khoo Kay Jin, Mei Ling Young, later joined by Wan Zawawi my Monash colleague, together with the seniors from CPR KJ, Gibbons and Lim Teck Ghee from Humanities. The visit of Dudlee Seers and Johan Galtung from Sweden, who jointly taught with me on the NIDL to the final year development studies seminar, helped to quickly strengthen this new trend in USM in the eyes of the international community of scholars.
After the highly successful UNCRD Seminar on growth poles, Fu-chen again proposed a follow up study on Rural-urban Transformation and Local-level Development. Besides again co-organizing the research project with Fu-chen, I was tasked with undertaking the Malaysian case study. To this end I commissioned a series of local studies in Kedah and Kelantan, which included one by Mei Ling Young on household migration from a rural area in Kedah, rubber marketing margins by Khoo Kay Jin, Hashim Yaacob and Halim Salleh on local-level processes in Kemubu in Kelantan, and Jomo Sundaram, Ishak Shari from UKM and a USM masters student Shadli on income distribution and poverty among the agricultural community in Kedah. The latter study was cited by Jomo in a UM seminar in 2013 as the reason why he got the associate director job with the FAO in Rome after his stint as Assistant Secretary General of the UN in New York. Mei Ling’s study was part of her PhD field work, for which I was appointed the official supervisor. Mei Ling would later join the development studies program as a demography lecturer. Halim would go on to Sussex to complete his Ph.D on Felda settlements in Dudley Seers department, the leading centre for development studies for the good part of the 70’s and 80’s. Ishak Shari would go on to head the Centre for Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS) in UKM. The Malaysian Study was presented to a UNCRD conference on regional development and rural-urban transformation in November of 1978, along with other case studies, but was never officially published except as a monograph of the UNCRD, but the whole UNCRD multi-country comparative study was produced as a volume by Maruzen.
It was in this study that Fuchen and I worked with Friedmann and his graduate student Mike Douglas to develop the agropolitan approach to local-level development as the rural complement to the growth center approach in regional development. After making several field visits - to South Korea to view the Sameoul Undong programme, which was patterned after the Malaysian Felda schemes, India (for the study of the Green Revolution in Punjab), and Iran to view traditional technology in village development in the Hamadan area - we ended up one evening walking on Jalan Bukit Bintang in KL and concocted the name “agropolitan” and cited it as the theory for local-level development for Asia. Its application would later spread to Indonesia, Pakistan, and finally thirty years later in 2006 when I was economic advisor to Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi’s administration was adopted as the official approach in the rural development program of the ministry of rural and regional development in the Ninth Malaysia Plan.
By 1976, I was already warming up to the public discourse on development under the New Economic Policy regime. The main platform was the Malaysian Economic Association (MEA) which brought together practicing economists and other social scientists from government, the private sector and academia. Its annual convention was billed as discussions of the National Economic Agenda, mirroring the issues and concerns of development, poverty and economic restructuring underlying the NEP. The development concerns associated with the NEP preoccupied much of the work and debate of the social science community over the next decades. To this end, a new Malaysian Social Science Association was launched to provide balance with the MEA in engaging in this policy discourse. I became one of the vice presidents of this new professional association. Further, a Northern Branch of the MEA was established in Penang in that year on the initiative of Chet Singh, the general manager of the Penang Development Corporation (PDC); the PDC was the operating agency which oversaw the industrial development program under Lim Chong Eu’s leadership in the state. I became vice-president of the MEA Northern Branch, and was also active as a Council member of the Consumers Association of Penang (CAP), which was the leading lobby for environmental preservation along with the Malaysian Nature Society and Sahabat Alam later, during a time when environmental concerns and sustainability was not in the government’s priority list, not until much later when Rio2000 pushed sustainability as the global agenda.
In the meantime, I had taken on during this period running toward the end of the 70s several consultancies for the Malaysian government, including for Rubber Industry Smallholders Development Authority (RISDA) on the problem of hard-core poverty groups; for the Economic Planning Unit, Prime Minister’s Department on regional development policy for the Third Malaysia Plan (1976–1980); for Pahang Tenggara Regional Development Authority (DARA) on the rehabilitation of traditional villages which were sidelined and did not benefit much from the development of the DARA regional development plans, and to find ways how to integrate them into the development scheme; and for the Modernization of Administration and Manpower Planning Unit (MAMPU), Prime Minister’s Department on the National Manpower Development Masterplan, working together with Paul Chan, who would later on in the mid-80s leave UM to establish HELP Institute with some colleagues from the Faculty of Economics and Administration, who were among the pioneer group of educational entrepreneurs to contribute to the expansion of the private higher education sector in Malaysia in the 80s and the following decades.
But it was in the pioneering work on data systems in the CPR launched in 1976, that became the flagship of my involvement in policy research and the Centre’s pride during this early period. KJ and I had managed to lobby with the government the importance of using administrative statistical records at a highly disaggregated level for the purpose of development planning, and the monitoring, coordination and evaluation of development projects. Malaysia had pioneered and became a model of development planning, implementation and monitoring with the introduction of the Red Book system by Tun Razak through maps and data set up in briefing rooms at the national and regional/state level all the way to the district and village level. This “analogue” system was highly successful. The Prime Minister had also structured the government development planning and implementation machinery through the Cabinet’s Directive No.1 when he first took over from the Tunku, which set up the National Action Council, with the EPU, SERU and the Implementation Coordination Unit (ICU) at the centre, and coordination of the ministries and line agencies by the National Development Planning Committee (NDPC), and mirrored this structure down to the state and local government levels. Taib Mahmud, the Minister of Socio Economic Research in charge of SERU became convinced with our pitch, and agreed to the research project we proposed which was dubbed the National Integrated Data System (NIDAS) project.
NIDAS was a pioneering computerized information system during a time when most geographic and data records were in analogue form, from cadastral land maps to punch card boxes and data tapes, and in flat files in departmental and agency storage and land and local government offices. It was a time also when the most sophisticated computer was the IBM370, which replaced the clunky PDP11 that I used before that, and way before desktop computers and gigabyte digital storage and the advent today of geographic information systems, Google Earth and Big Data. Still using slides (before the availability of Powerpoint software), we demonstrated the power of integrated data systems to Lim Chong Eu at the official launch of NIDAS in the Dewan Syed Putra in Georgetown in 1976, by a search of his property ownership using a pilot digitized data file of the Penang State land records, and successfully showed that he owned four properties in the state by using just his identity card number. An intrepid innovator himself, Chong Eu was so impressed and agreed to fund the Seberang Perai Local Authority Property Information System (LAPIS), which was led by Chee Kim Loy. This system is still being used today, and with the digital revolution has been expanded nationwide.
In preparation for the conduct of the NIDAS project I had visited a number of research centres in Europe working to develop their own geographic data systems, and manage to gather information useful for the Malaysian case study from centres in Oslo, Stockholm, Bonn and London. Lim Huat Seng, head of the USM computer centre, helped in developing the NIDAS database management systems. In the same year accompanied by Mohd Nor Ghani, deputy director-general of SERU, I presented a paper on NIDAS to an international conference on geographic information systems held in Grenoble, France, organized by the OECD, and came back to inform CPR of the positive reception by our European counterparts who had admired at our stage of development which were ahead of some of them in their own effort.
NIDAS was of course not the only famous project in the CPR stable. From out of the MADA study, David Gibbons and Shukor Kassim launched the Amanah Ikhtiar research project to pioneer in Malaysia a micro-credit system for rural entrepreneurs, which turned out to be mainly taken up by women who proved to be very reliable borrowers. Amanah Ikhtiar would later be adopted by the Malaysian government as Tabung Amanah Ikhtiar with a much larger annual budget as the Grameen Bank version of the country’s rural micro-credit system. This project continued to be operated by Shukor and David for some years after the fund’s launch.
After three years of my return home, I was interviewed in 1976 for promotion to associate professor, the new designation under the Harun Commission recommendations to replace the old senior lecturer post. Hamzah Sendut asked how I managed to produce so many academic papers, I replied “With difficulty sir!”, much to the bemusement of Zambri who related to me the committee’s reaction later. Remembering the VC’s earlier admonition when I first paid the courtesy call on him, I realized as soon as I uttered them that that was a too smart alec’s answer, that probably would have scuttled my chances; but based on my academic record then, I did get the promotion.
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| Musa Muhammad |
Shortly after that moment, Musa Muhammad, who was recruited by Hamzah Sendut on secondment from the government to head the new pharmaceutical sciences school, became the second DVC after the clamour by students for a more sympathetic administrator to handle the bumiputera student issues who were having difficulty in their studies due to a lack of teaching materials in Bahasa Malaysia, the official language of instruction in Malaysian universities. In time, Hamdan Tahir, a retired director general of education, had taken over from Hamzah Sendut as Vice Chancellor, whose contract was not extended probably because of his differences over tertiary education policy with the then minister of education. Then, Musa swapped position with Sharom when he become DVC for academic affairs while Sharom took over as the newly created DVC for Research and Development. Sharom Ahmat, who had as dean of humanities fought hard against grade inflation, a tendency by lecturers to push up students to passing grade with disastrous long-term impact on the quality of teaching and learning on campus, was an unfortunate target of student activists’ zeal to see a change in their favour. I had been caught in this politically delicate situation which presented itself as a professional dilemma between maintaining standards and fulfilling the NEP’s policy targets. I had earlier undertaken for a USM seminar on teaching and learning processes at the tertiary level, a quick survey of students entering the school of humanities on their English language proficiency standardized by HSC/matriculation grades to see the impact of the lack of English competency on their first year academic performance, and found an astounding correlation. It was a highly untenable situation, but politics overrode academic considerations. This was the beginning of a course of events that would lead to the crisis of 1985 in USM.
In all these early years as an academic, I managed to maintain a balance, with great difficulty to use an earlier phrase, between professional responsibilities and the pressure of national politics evolving rapidly beyond the campus. At times the internal politics, as would prove later to be the case, was more overpowering than the real politics outside, while at other times it was difficult to separate them; but, professional pride would not permit me to succumb to both pressure and temptation in the academic fast lane.
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