Robert Armstrong, Class of 1957
Audio transcript:
"I am Bob Armstrong, class ’57, MBA ’59. I have done a number of things since leaving the University. But, the last twenty-five years I have spent most of my time in Eastern Africa.
The last twelve of those years I have been a visiting Professor of Agra-Business at African University which is a new university; it’s a Pan-African institution, we have students from twenty different African countries. And it is in Mutari, Zimbabwe and Zimbabwe has gone from the third most productive economy in sub-Saharan Africa to a country that is now financially broke and is probably one of the poorest countries in the world if you look at per capita income.
At the little University, there is a good friend of mine, Dr. Kingston Mandesouza (sp) who came to Cornell University and did his undergraduate, his Masters and his PhD in the faculty of Agriculture majoring in the pork or piggery business and of course information is always a problem.
And I picked up your brochure that said “free access to alumni and friends”, and I asked a helpful young lady how do you have to identify and prove that you are an alumni and get on to this information. Because, I would like to send this card back to Kingston, or send him an email and see if he can access this.
I went into the program under my name and the first thing we saw was that there was a sign-up fee of $150 which didn’t sound like a free program to me.
And then we found another category and clicked another dot, that said there was some 700 online information sources. One of which is a major agricultural database that I’m sure would be helpful to Kingston. And, so, I think it’s rather interesting and hopefully we will be able to get him involved with this as the economy is in such terrible conditions in Zimbabwe.
So, if we can do this to help an alumnus overseas, it would be neat and fun and I’d be glad to stumble on this bit of information."