Professor’s retirement recalls Lincoln College in its pioneering bicycle and scythe days

Press, 31 May 1985, Page 18

Professor’s retirement recalls Lincoln College in its pioneering bicycle and scythe days

By

JAMES HOMES,

journalist,

Lincoln College

Twenty-six years ago students at Lincoln College filed into a classroom to hear the first lecture from a newly-appointed professor who was to change the direction of teaching and research in plant science at the college. Slightly-built Professor Reinhart Langer, just arrived from England, spoke in a carefully-modulated English voice, with just a trace of an accent that was not English. His accent may not have been noticed by those in the class, but many realised they were listening to a scholar.

When Professor Langer, now Professor Emeritus, retired a fewweeks ago, he recalled his first days at Lincoln, and some of his students remembered that first lecture he gave. Born in Northern Germany and educated in Berlin before the Second World War, Professor Langer reached Lincoln College byway of the University of Durham and the British Grasslands Research Institute.

After completing secondary school at 18, he went to England, with the ambition of becoming a veterinarian. “The war broke out, and that was the end of my boyhood dream of being a vet,” he says.

“I spent the whole war working on farms: mixed cropping, dairying, and, towards the end. horticulture. When the war was over, the opportunity of going to university presented itself. Fortunately, I got some scholarships, because I was living on my savings at the time.”

His interests had then switched to agricultural science, so he went to Durham University where he graduated Bachelor of Science with first-class honours in agricultural botany in 1949. He got another scholarship to do his Ph.D. in plant physiology, and completed this in 1952 while working for the Grasslands Research Institute.

Professor Langer found the Lincoln College of 1959 quite different to the University of Durham. “My overwhelming first impression was

that Lincoln was small, and not at all well endowed," he says. “One had to scratch and scrape, and improvise to get anything done. People had been far too busy and preoccupied with practical problems to think a great deal about research in depth.” The size of the college at that time allowed for closer personal interest and “When I took over the plant science department there was an academic staff of four, one technician, a bicycle, and a scythe." Most of the students lived at the college then, many of them in Hudson Hall, and were close neighbours of the Langers.

The Professor and his wife. Hilary, lived in a double-storeyed house on the edge of the campus, and the students were always made welcome there. “Quite a few of them came to our place as babysitters, and at other times, and we have maintained many of those earlv connections.”

When Professor Langer took up his appointment as Professor of Plant Science in 1959 the college had 334 students; this year there are 1858.

When he relinquished the position in 1981, the staff had built up to 14 academics, six technicians, a demonstrator, a laboratory steward, and two teaching fellows. The department was then teaching plant and crop physiology, agronomy, ecology, genetics, agricultural botany, and biometrics. Professor Langer was responsible for the teaching and research of these subjects.

He has been honoured for his work in plant science by being made a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, a Fellow of the Australia and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Agricultural Science.

He became Vice-Principal of Lincoln College in 1978, and held this post until he retired. He became Acting Principal early in 1984, and headed the college until the new Principal. Professor Bruce Ross, arrived in March.

Professor Langer saw his coming to the college in 1959 as a “pioneering kind of situation." The college had realised a need to break into a new era and other professors were appointed to soil science, economics, and animal science.

“We started a new phase, with much greater accent on research students,” Professor Langer says “Fortunately, we were greatly helped by the expansion of the university system.

“Suddenly, the whole universitysystem in New Zealand had come of age, with more students, new buildings, new equipment and new facilities. During the 1960 s and 1970 s the whole show just exploded; this was a very fortunate time to come in."

Before this expansion was felt by the college, some facilities were primitive and there was enormous improvisation. “The equipment for research was primitive; I said one technician and a scythe, and more or less this was the way it was.”

His outlook on research was different, and, at times “1 certainly did have the feeling that. 1 had come from a different planet.” His approach to research was to take practical problems to pieces and look at the pieces. “Fairly obvious to me was that talking about yield in wheat was too big a thing. “I taught my students that what one was really looking at was how many ears the crop produced, how many grains each ear contained, and how big each individual grain was. If you start looking at yield in this way, you can then start to relate the components to the fac-

tors influencing those components. "I would try to lake complex things to pieces and look at relationships between factors that could be controlled, such as fertiliser, temperature, time of sowing, and so on.”

Dr Warwick Scott, senior lecturer in plant science who worked with Professor Langer for many years, called this “Langerising” a problem. Dissecting a problem into simpler components that could be managed and related was quite different to what was being done in New Zealand at the time, Professor Langer says. “They were quite prepared to look at yield plots and put on more fertiliser to get more yield, but exactly what happened was never quite known.” With his approaches to research becoming well accepted at the college, Professor Langer moved on to collecting information and publishing this in books and reviews. Since then results of his work have been written up in 60 research papers, in journals such as the Annals of Botany, the Journal of Agricultural Science, the Annals of Applied Biology, and the New Zealand Journal of Agricultural Research. He has also written or edited four books, and these have become standard texts. His first book was "The Lucerne Crop,” which he edited; this was published in 1967. He also edited “Pastures and Pasture Plants," which was published in 1973 and again in 1977. His book “How Grasses Grow,” first published in 1972, was reprinted in 1979. With the Lincoln College plant scientist, George Hill, he wrote “Agricultural Plants,” and this was published in 1982. “We have always used these books at Lincoln, and found them useful," Professor Langer says. “We wrote these for Lincoln, and the writing was largely a team effort: some of them are very much multi-author.”

One of his retirement projects will be to rewrite “Pastures and

Pasture Plants,” because “the book has got to be rewritten.”

These four books are now on his study bookshelves at home, along with books by authors as different as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Iris Murdoch, and a Companion to Mozart's Piano Concertos in a tightly-packed collection reflecting wide-ranging interests.

These wide interests mark him as being different from other agricultural scientists. “I have always been interested in putting a bit of an accent on the culture in agriculture," he says. And he learned more Latin in his life than any other language. As an agricultural scientist his main research interests have been the physiology and agronomy of crop and pasture plants, particularly pasture grasses, wheat, and lucerne. He has used detailed studies of the development of these plants to explain growth patterns and yields under field conditions. Also, he has given special attention to the physiological processes, such as grain set in wheat, or tillering and leaf production in pasture grasses, likely to limit yield. Professor Langer dismisses the image of Lincoln College as just rugby and gumboots. “That is not my view of the image, but that could be the way some less wellinformed city dwellers see the

college. Certainly there is very much a rural image, but I hope that it is not just rugby and gumboots.”

Dr John Hayward, now head of the Centre for Resource Management, says Professor Langer helped change the public view of the college. He taught Dr Hayward, then an agicultural science student, when he first arrived at the college.

"He forced people to think of Lincoln College as a place other than of sheep, horses, and muddy boots,” Dr Hayward says. “He brought science to agriculture, and gave agriculture a new meaning."

Dr Hayward recalls Professor Langer’s lectures as “superbly organised, and very professional.” Also, he recollects that students soon saw Professor Langer as having “quite a gentle sense of humour."

Professor Langer says the college still has a long way to go to lose the purely rural image. “Establishing the image that management, economics, finance, accountancy, and pure science are things the college does well will take some time. Better-informed people know that these are just part and parcel of the college. The general public finds this much harder to accept."

Professor Langer says the rapport the college has built up with New Zealand farmers is also important. "Farmers are so keen to get up-to-date information that you have to make darned sure that when you do research you get on with telling them what the results are.

"They practically breathe down your neck to find out what you found out yesterday. The feeling that you are actually wanted and that what you are doing means something to these people is great. They are waiting for you to come up with the information, so at the college one was not working in a vacuum.

“I think, too, there is a great deal of loyalty among students at Lincoln, and a much greater sense of belonging than at other universities. Having gone to Lincoln College is something rather different from having gone to Canterbury. Otago, or Victoria.” Professor Langer says one reason for this is that Lincoln College is a unique national institution. There is nothing like the college anywhere else in New Zealand, nor anywhere else in the world is there an agricultural college of the same scale.

Professor Bruce Ross, now Principal of Lincoln College, was also

one of Professor Langer's studenis. “Professor Langer and I had our first lecture at the college on the same day. but, of course, from opposite sides of the lectern." Professor Ross says. "Even on that first day he showed all those qualities for which, very soon, he was recognised as one of the best, if not the best, of lecturers at the college. His enthusiasm, his knowledge and clarity ot expressing that knowledge, made plant physiology clear even to a non-scientist such as me.”

Preparing for his retirement. Professor Langer has been clearing some 20 hectares of land he has at Akaroa. He calls the land a hill country run — "or runlet. I suppose I should say" — and has already planted pines and other trees. But before he settles on the land be is going to Germany, Austria, France, and England "on a sort of sheer holiday.”

Professor Langer was described by Professor Ross, at the farewell given him by the college, as having become “something of a Kiwi gentleman." He acknowledges having taken completely to the outdoor New Zealand way of life. “I am certainly not in the model of the European scientist, sitting in his study and reading books."