Wilfred Gordon Malcolm (Wilf) CBE November 29, 1933 – October 6, 2018 A master of mathematics of people and faith
Wilf Malcolm, who has died aged 84, was that most rarefied of men, a professor of Pure Mathematics. As such, his PhD thesis was supervised by two philosophers and one mathematician at Victoria University.
He was also a visionary administrator and leader and served as the second ViceChancellor of the University of Waikato, after Don Llewellyn, from 1985 to 1994. During his time, he focused on growing the university’s academic programmes, research activity, and student enrolment and, over his first term, student numbers trebled.
Wilf’s legacy to the University of Waikato is formidable: his was the force behind the establishment of the bicultural Law School; he used all his considerable powers of persuasion to promote the Music Department; he and his wife, Ruth, bequeathed the titoki grove on campus; and he lived to see the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Education, which recognises Wilf’s great interest in education in the wider sense, open its doors.
Friend and colleague, Warwick Silvester, Emeritus Professor from Waikato University, said he first met Wilf in late 1984, at what promised to be an acrimonious meeting in Wellington involving about 20 high-level representatives from five universities and two colleges.
‘‘Chairing the meeting was a professor of mathematics. I wondered what on earth he knew about the politics of the matter at hand.
‘‘At the end of the day, I knew why Wilf Malcolm had been chosen to chair such a potentially acrimonious meeting.
‘‘We had a master lesson in diplomacy, in the calming of prima donnas, and in gaining a reasonable consensus out of a difficult situation.’’
On his retirement, Waikato University awarded Wilf an honorary doctorate.
During his school years at Feilding Agricultural College, Wilf much preferred sport to study, excelling in cricket, rugby and tennis. On leaving secondary school, he moved to Wellington, enrolling as a primary teacher trainee at Wellington Teacher Training College. He studied concurrently at Victoria University of Wellington, at first in English, as it was thought trainee teachers always failed mathematics.
He proved them wrong by passing the subject the next year, and went on to win a senior scholarship and finish his MA with First Class Honours in mathematics.
This background may help to explain his well-known skill in teaching and in communicating both enthusiasm and abstract ideas. It was his strong Christian faith that then guided him into his first position after graduation as Travelling Secretary to the Inter-School Christian Fellowship.
He won a Shirtcliffe Fellowship in 1958, which enabled him to take Parts II and III of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, a rigorous course specialising in algebra and topology. He married Ruth Prebensen in 1959, and then returned to Victoria as a lecturer in Pure Mathematics.
From 1964 to 1966 Wilf took another break from mathematics, working as General Secretary of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship of Evangelical Unions (later the Tertiary Students’ Christian Fellowship), but returned to lecturing in 1967.
He introduced algebraic topology to Honours level classes in the early 1960s and then moved in the mid-sixties to mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics. The latter subject eventually percolated much further down than Honours level, helped by his textbook Number and Structure.
He was appointed to the Chair of Pure Mathematics in 1975. For the next decade, before moving to the Waikato, he took up wider responsibilities in university management. In his chairmanship of the Leave Committee he brought a concern for fairness and conviction that staff should be treated equally, regardless of rank.
As Academic Pro-Vice-Chancellor he guided many reviews of policies and procedures and was the key figure in the discussions and negotiations over the possibility of closer relations between the University and the Wellington Clinical School. He sat on the Wellington Teachers’ College Council and laid some of the groundwork that led eventually to the formation of the university’s Education Faculty.
In 1985, Wilf and Ruth moved to the University of Waikato to take up the vicechancellorship, serving in that role until 1994. Warwick said during Wilf’s time as vice-chancellor he was philosophically and practically firmly embedded in the notion of teaching and research excellence as the prime goals of a University.
‘‘He was driven by his strong Christian faith and above all, his tenure was characterised by his recognition of the rights and aspirations of individuals.
‘‘Wilf routinely would be seen in various departmental tea rooms throughout the campus where he made it a duty to be available to any of the staff. In addition, he set up a group with no standing, to meet irregularly in such a way that Wilf could obtain informal feedback from a wide selection of staff on the best use of the university’s resources.’’
In the 1994 Queen’s Birthday Honours, Wilf was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, for services to tertiary education. After leaving the University of Waikato Wilf was appointed to a number of senior administrative positions.
In the late 90s Wilf was a visiting professor to the Universiti Brunei Darussalam.
In 2000, he took up a three-year appointment as chairman of the board of the universities’ Academic Audit Unit (AAU), a body concerned with academic standards, and which he had helped to establish in 1994. At the time of his appointment, Wilf noted the AAU’s function was to provide an external audit of quality processes to ensure public accountability.
In 2001 Labour minister Margaret Wilson appointed Wilf as Chair of the Education Advisory Committee, whose members included representatives from the Employers Federation, Council of Trade Unions and tertiary institutions and whose role was to help educate people about the new industrial relations laws.
In 2003, the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research was opened by Education Minister Trevor Mallard at the University of Waikato. The Institute, in the School of Education, focuses on research of cultural and literacy issues, Maori education, and student achievement.
In 2007, Wilf co-wrote with Professor Nicholas Tarling, of Auckland University, a book that made a compelling case for how the ideology of the New Right and the rise of managerialism in the 80s had a punishing effect on collegiality in universities.
Wilf also published a book honouring his sister Margaret Malcolm, a Palmerston North educator, who became the first female principal of Wellington Teachers College in 1982.
Wilf was the husband of Ruth; father of Hilary, Alison, Judith, Kirsten, Gordon and Tane; and their families.
Sources: NZ Mathematical Society newsletter, University of Waikato, newspapers, the Malcolm family.
Charles Riddle
A Life Story tells of a New Zealander who helped to shape the Waikato community. If you know of someone whose life story should be told, please email Charles.riddle@wintec.ac.nz