22 November 1984 Director of the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia visits Lincoln College

A former Lincoln College student from Malaysia who studied under the Colombo Plan in the late 1950s and now heads the top rubber research organisation in Malaysia is back for his first visit since graduating Bachelor of Science in 1959.

He is Dr Ani Arope, Director of the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia in New Zealand on a private holiday visit until early next month.

After leaving Lincoln College, where he began work on a master's degree, he gained a master's degree from the University of Vermont, in the United States, where he went on a Fulbright Scholarship.

Subsequently he was awarded a D.Sc. by the University of Ghent, in Belgium.

Dr Ani Arope said that when he went back to Malaysia in 1959 worked for the Department of Agriculture as a cadet agronomist.

"Later I was put on as an agricultural development officer and went to a small state on the East Coast, where only the wild ones are sent," he said.

Dr Ani Arope refers to himself as one of the wild ones when he was at Lincoln College, but he is remembered for his involvement with the local community.

"I used to run the local cub pack most of them would be in their thirties by now."

On his research fellowship in the U.S. where he spent two years he worked on fertiliser responses and built an economic model for measurement.

"And then I came home and they gave me the nice fanciful name of assistant director agronomy at the Department of Agriculture.

"That was back in 1966. Then, for sins I didn't commit, I was banished to Russia for three months - to the Patrice Lumbumba University."

In 1968 Dr Ani Arope helped establish a new research institute: the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute, and in 1972 became deputy director.

He has been Director of R.R.I.M. for 14 years.

The Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia is completely funded by growers, and has a budget of about $NZ50 million a year.

"The institute has about 220 scientists, except for me all very young ; average age is about 35, maybe slightly more.

"When I went in we had only a handful of PhDs - about nine or 12 - now we have about 105."

Dr Ani Arope said there was a lot of emphasis on training and retraining ; "even a brand new PhD. goes out of date after five years."

His staff go to many countries to further their education, and Lincoln College has three post-graduate students from R.R.I.M. at present, and there is one at the University of Canterbury.

"They go all over the place : the United States, France, Belgium and the traditional places like the U.K. and Australia and even to Poland .

"We are not fussy. Anybody who wants to take them in, we send them. Doesn't matter whether they have rubber or not .

"What is important is training the mind.

If you have a good trained mind you can get back to anything you want to do."

Dr Ani Arope said the strong thing at Lincoln College was the balance of the practical and the academic.

This was important for developing countries, such as Malaysia.

"We don't want them coming back thinking they are high caste or high class people at least not in Malaysia.

"You need a balanced attitude to life. Lincoln gives it”

"Here at Lincoln there is· New Zealand for that matter and in equal emphasis on the practical and the academic.

"The caste system is not rigid here. Jack is as good as his master. At R.R.I. everyone has the right to walk into my room. I think that was an attitude I picked up here.

"If you have this approach, people relax, and can contribute. Everybody should be able to contribute. Even the labourer."

Dr Ani Arope said he enjoyed the strong training in farm work while at Lincoln.

"I ran a farm in Auckland when I was here. My employer took leave for two weeks to go fishing and I ran the farm. I thought that was the biggest reward I could get."

Practical work was one of the strong  selling points of Lincoln training, he said.

"You are a Mr Nobody. Down on the ground. You have to work."

Dr Ani Arope emphasised that there always had to be new approaches to research, because if this goes out of date the whole system goes out of date.

"Some countries think that once a chap has got a degree he has arrived, but he has just been given a licence to operate."

Dr Ani Arope is spending four days at Lincoln College meeting staff he knew when he was here.

He will then tour New Zealand before leaving for Tokyo early in December