By PHOEBE FALCONER
Sir Alan Stewart, KBE, CBE, Vice-Chancellor of Massey University. Died aged 86. WHEN Dr Alan Stewart was appointed principal of Massey Agricultural College in 1959, the roll stood at just 578.
Today the university has three campuses, in Palmerston North, Albany and Wellington. It caters for 19,000 local and international students and more than 18,000 studying by correspondence.
Sir Alan, knighted in 1981 for services to education, died on September 1 in Whakatane.
The present Vice-Chancellor, Professor Judith Kinnear, said Sir Alan was a remarkable man. He was the college's second Rhodes Scholar, its second principal and its founding Vice-Chancellor from 1964 to 1983.
He led Massey through the transition from agricultural college via university college to full university.
Sir Alan first entered Massey as a graduate student in 1937 and after completing his master's degree in agricultural science was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1940.
His Oxford study was interrupted by World War II and Stewart, on loan to the Royal Navy, spent the next five years at sea.
He completed his doctorate in 1949 and returned to Massey to take up a job as senior lecturer. Time in England as chief consulting officer to the Milk Marketing Board served as a stepping stone on his way back to the top job at his alma mater, Massey.
Pro Vice-Chancellor of Sciences Professor Robert Anderson described Sir Alan as a highly skilled negotiator with a no-nonsense approach.
That straightforward attitude was certainly apparent when I was a student at Massey in the mid-1960s. A night-time raid on our hostel by male students, during which they stuffed silage into toilets, hand-basins and the kitchen cupboards, and our revenge - dyeing their underwear pink and laying it out on the refectory lawn - met swift and certain retribution.
"Students want to be treated as adults and allowed the same rights," he told the Weekly News at the time. But he believed they should act like adults.
Sir Alan's last visit to Massey was in June to attend the 75th reunion of Massey's Rugby Football Club in Palmerston North.
Sir Alan is survived by his wife, Joan, four children and 12 grandchildren.
<i>Obituary:</i> Sir Alan Stewart
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