The seed they sowed: Centennial story of Lincoln College

Abstract

This is the story of a University College of Agriculture as it approaches its Centennial. It is essentially a personal story, for Lincoln College is a human family the stature of whose genealogical tree may be measured by the worth of successive staff and students. It is written, appropriately enough, by a member of the family who has lived in its midst for almost half the century, and while, therefore, the record is chronicled in fact it is presented with opinion. What has evolved is thus more of an historical portrait than a formal official history. When the College Council sought an author for this Centennial publication it turned naturally to Ian Blair, former student, recently retired head of the College's Department of Agricultural Microbiology and bulwark of the Old Students' Association. He accepted the commission and has laboured with patience, diligence and dedication. Known as much for the directness of his viewpoints as for his deep love for and loyalty to Lincoln College, Dr. Blair has left his own imprint on a manuscript that makes all the better reading for its forthright treatment. Passages may provoke discussion and debate, and if so neither the author nor the College as publisher is inclined to withdraw or recant. After all, history is dull record without the background of perspective interpretation and what author is worth the price of his pen who fails to cast some personal image over his writing? Suffice it to say that the views of the author are not necessarily those of the College and that each recognises that an occasional inaccuracy of fact inevitably will have evaded correction. Lincoln College, affiliated to the University of Canterbury, ranks third in order of foundation among New Zealand's university institutions, third also among agricultural colleges in the Commonwealth and first in the Southern Hemisphere. It takes pride in this seniority, as it does also in its mono-faculty objective of advancing knowledge in the fields of agriculture and related interests. It enjoys strong corporate unity through close relationships between staff and students aided by relative smallness in numbers. Its history therefore evokes a compact picture which nevertheless embraces all shades of varying disciplines under the one broad umbrella. As the College entered its one hundredth year it was honoured, on March 4, 1977, by a visit from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and by His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, who, in a special programme of inspection followed by a joint luncheon with Christchurch and provincial civic representatives, were able to note aspects of the history of the College and of its work. The occasion was marked by an announcement that the centennial year project for Lincoln would be the establishment of a foundation to advance education in New Zealand with special reference to agriculture and related interests. The Lincoln College Foundation, which Dr. Blair mentions in the final chapter of his book, thus translates some of a century's achievements into a national objective for the future, and an historian in fifty or one hundred years' time will have the opportunity of balancing this College's achievements on behalf of New Zealand in even clearer focus than has now been evident.