07 May 1985 Professor Langer retires

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 direct~on 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 few weeks 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 had reached Lincoln College by way of the University of Durham, and the British Grasslands Research Institute.

While at school his ambition had been to become a veterinary surgeon, but the war changed his direction.

When he faced that first class at Lincoln College he already had a sound background in plant physiology.

He had gone to the Grasslands Institute from Durham University where he had graduated Bachelor of Science with first class honours in agricultural botany in 1949, and gained a Ph.D. in plant physiology in 1952.

After completing secondary school at 18, he went to England, still with the notion of becoming a veterinarian.

"The war broke out, and that was the end of my boyhood dream of being a vet," he said.

"I spent the whole war working on farms : mixed cropping, dairying, and, towards the end, horticulture.

"When the war was over, the opportunity of go;ing to university presented itself, and, 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 to do a degree in agricultural botany,

He got another scholarship to do his Ph.D, and completed this 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 said.

"One had to scratch and scrape, and improvise to get anything done at all.

"People had been far too busy and preoccupied with practical problems to think a great deal about research in depth."

Professor Langer said that the size of the college at that time allowed for closer personal interest and concern.

"When I took over the Plant Science Department there was an academic staff of four, one technician, a bicycle and a scythe."

Getting to know people and establishing a personal connection with them was not difficult, he said.

Most of the students lived at the college then, many of them in Hudson Hall and were close neighbours of the Langers.

Professor Langer and his wife Hilary lived in a double-storeyed house on the edge of the campus, and students were always made welcome there.

"Quite a few of them came to our place as baby sitters, and at other times, and we have maintained many of those early connections."

Some of those who knew him in his early days at the college remember him as being an English gentleman.

While acknowledging that he might have been gentlemanly, he said "you will find gentleman wherever you go."

"Professor Jack Calder, whom I succeeded, was one of the world's real gentlemen, with a reputation for extremely good manners, kindness
and thoughtfulness.

"Just because the college was small when I arrived, it doesn't follow that it was not gentlemanly, or all rough and tumble."

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 of head of the plant science department 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.

Professor Langer 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 said he 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 had appointed new professors to do this.

Professor Langer was appointed to plant science, 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 said.

"Fortunately, we were greatly helped by the expansion of the university system .

"Suddenly the whole university system in New Zealand had come of age, with more students, new buildings, new equipment and new facilities.

"During the 1960s and 1970s the whole show just exploded ; this was a very fortunate time to come in."

But 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, more or less this was the way it was," he said.

Professor Langer's outlook on research was different, and, at times "I certainly did have the feeling that I 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 factors influencing those components.

"I would try to take 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 said.

"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.

Professor Langer's first book was The Lucerne Crop_., which he edited this was published in 1967 .

He 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 .

Along with 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," he said.

"We wrote these for Lincoln, and the writing was largely a team effort some of them are very much multi author."

Professor Langer said that one of his retirement projects was to rewrite Pastures and Pasture Plants.

"This is one of my projects because the book has got to be rewritten," he said.

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 said.

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.

And 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 the image, in my view, but that could be the way some less well-informed 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, said Professor Langer helped change the public view of the college.

Professor Langer taught Dr Hayward, then an agricultural 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 said.

"He brought science to agriculture, and gave agriculture a new meaning."

Dr Hayward recall~ Professor Langer's lectures a "superbly organised, and very professional,"

And Dr Hayward also recollects that students soon saw Professor Langer has 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.

"Many people still see the college as being somewhere out in the country, teaching agriculture and, of course, horticulture these days,'' he
said.

"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.

"However, the general public finds this much harder to accept."

Lincoln College was very large for a single-discipline institution, and not even in Australia was there an institution as large or as complex  he said.

Professor Langer said the rapport the college had built up with New Zealand farmers was also important .

"New Zealand 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," he said.

''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.'

Professor Langer said the involvement of farmers with the college was quite different and unusual for such an institution.

"I think 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 to having gone to Canterbury, Otago or Victoria."

Professor Langer said one reason for this was that Lincoln College was a unique national institution.

There was nothing like the college anywhere else in New Zealand, nor anywhere else in the world was there an agricultural college of the same scale.

Professor Bruce Ross, now Principal of Lincoln College, was also one of Professor Langer's students. "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 said.

"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 of expressing that knowledge made plant physiology clear even to a non-scientist such as me," he said.

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 he 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 e "something of a Kiwi gentleman."

He acknowledges having taken completely to the New Zealand way of life, and getting out and about.

He recognises that in spite of his European background he has become at one with his adopted country. 

"I am certainly not in the model of the European scientist, sitting in his study and reading books."