Published in IIE book, EDU magazine

I have recently published in a book by IIE and EDU magazine.

Institute of International Education (IIE) book is entitled "International India: A Turning Point in Educational Exchange with the U.S." focusing on U.S.-India higher education exchanges. I have co-authored a chapter on background and trends in the U.S.-India academic collaborations. The book is edited by Dr. Rajika Bhandari of IIE and includes chapters from Mr. Sam Pitroda and Dr. Philip Altbach. 

EDU is a new magazine which focuses on higher education sector in India. The editor of the magazine is Dr. Pramath Raj Sinha who was founding dean of the ISB. I have authored a chapter entitled "Leading without Leadership?" where I argue that leading higher educational institutions is a complex and challenging role which requires unique competencies. There is a need for developing a profession of educational leadership through systematic education, research and professional development.

 I would welcome any thoughts/questions you might have. 

- Dr. Rahul Choudaha

Dean Yash Gupta, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

Dr. Yash Gupta
Dean & Professor
The Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

Yash Gupta is dean and professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in Baltimore, Md. He previously served as dean of the business schools of the University of Southern California, the University of Washington, and the University of Colorado at Denver. Dean Gupta’s academic and administrative appointments have also included the Frazier Family Professor in the School of Business at the University of Louisville (1988-1992), professor at the University of Manitoba, and assistant professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland. In 1991, he was awarded the University of Louisville President’s Award for Outstanding Scholarship, Research and Creative Activity, and in 1994 and 1996 he was ranked as the most prolific scholar in the area of operations management in the United States. He currently serves on the governing board of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). Dean Gupta earned a Ph.D. in management sciences from the University of Bradford, England, in 1976. He also holds a M.Tech, production management, from Brunel University of West London, England; a B.Sc.Eng, production engineering, from Panjab University, India; and a P.Eng. from the Association of Professional Engineers of the Province of Manitoba, Canada. In addition, he completed the College Management Program in the Heinz School of Public Affairs at Carnegie Mellon University.

Rahul- The Johns Hopkins Carey Business School is the newest business school at one of the finest research universities in the world. At a time when the approach of business schools is being questioned, how does the Carey Business School plan to differentiate itself and offer value?
Dean Gupta- Traditionally, business schools have preached that the maximization of shareholder value is the primary goal of an organization. Is the stock price up or down? This is a myopic view of success. What’s more, B-schools have taught people on a paradigm that existed a half-century ago, when global understanding was not that important. The United States called the shots. We shipped our products around the world, and people bought them because they had no other alternatives. It was a veritable monopoly, so there was no need for us to take a global outlook, to try to learn much about the ways other people lived.

Now the business dynamic has changed drastically, in part because of the rise of China, India, Brazil, Russia, and other nations. To compete with them, today’s business leaders need a whole new set of tools – tools that reflect what I call “the art of business.” That means we must teach our business students, as we do here at Johns Hopkins, to internalize the ideas of flexibility, adaptability, empathy. Because the marketplace today is spread around the globe, you have to understand people’s cultures, their history, and their geography if you want to do business with them.

This comes fairly naturally here at Johns Hopkins, because we have built a presence in more than 100 countries. Also, we’re the oldest research university in the United States; therefore, fresh and adaptable thinking is second nature to us, as is innovation – the university produces about 350 new discoveries every year. Our business school was created in that same spirit of international engagement, international understanding, and, most important, service to the international community. That’s why we say the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School is the school “where business is taught with humanity in mind.”

Rahul- Your Web site mentions that the Johns Hopkins Global MBA program emphasizes "the application of innovative business concepts to actual business problems." Please share more about the curricular innovations in the program and how they fit your vision for the incoming "charter class" of 80 students.
Dean Gupta- For starters, we take a different approach to the B-school essentials of finance, management, operation, and marketing. Unlike many business schools, we don’t just approach each of these topics as an isolated area of study. We examine them within the dynamics of a modern business. Our students move through a series of integrated modules that reflect the nature and structure of real-world business problems in the areas of financial resources, people and markets, business processes, and managerial decision behavior, particularly as they apply to health- and science-related challenges.

We have the Discovery to Market Project, which uses the vast pool of discoveries made in the health sciences and related fields at Johns Hopkins so that we provide our students with insight into translating a scientific discovery into a product or technology with potential for commercialization.

There’s the Service to Humanity Project, which requires our students to take part in an international experience so that they develop an understanding of how to build sustainable businesses amid the complex challenges of developing markets. They learn how to be successful in places with weak infrastructures, fragmented banking systems, and political instability. Such places are where we’ll find the markets and the workers of the future; and as I often point out, leaders are the ones who get to the future first, so our goal in preparing the business leaders of the future is to give them an understanding of what the future of business will look like.

We have the weekly Thought and Discourse Seminars, conducted by prominent business leaders and policy makers. The idea behind the format is to stimulate analytical thinking, persuasive communication, and creative expression. This is intellectual inquiry and debate about how business people make their decisions and how they communicate their ideas.

Also, in regard to global understanding, we have the great advantage of being here in Baltimore, just 40 miles from all the foreign embassies in Washington, D.C. These are great reservoirs of knowledge about various nations and their cultures, their economics, their politics. We intend to take full advantage of the proximity of all this invaluable knowledge.

Rahul- Before coming to the Carey Business School, you had high-impact leadership experiences at the University of Washington and the University of Southern California. You also write a blog on leadership for the Washington Post. How is leading a research university different or similar to leading a for-profit corporate entity?
Dean Gupta- The two are very different. A for-profit organization’s motivation is just as the title implies – profit. The objective of a university like ours is to disseminate as much knowledge and information as we can. The idea isn’t so much to make a profit as to profit the world and its people.

The late A. Bartlett Giamatti, who was the president of Yale, put it so well when he wrote that “a college or university is an institution where financial incentives to excellence are absent; where the product line is not a unit or an object but rather a value-laden and lifelong process; where the goal of the enterprise is not growth or market share but intellectual excellence; not profit or proprietary rights, but the free good of knowledge; not efficiency of operation but equity of treatment; not increased productivity in economic terms, but increased intensity of thinking about who we are and how we live and about the world around us.”

World-Class Universities in India: Realizing Vision

The fascination for building-world class universities is the latest buzz in the Indian education sector. Recently, Reliance announced its intention to start a world-class university. Earlier, Anil Agarwal with his donation of $1billion initiated the Vedanta University project with a vision that it would be a world-class university. Even Mr. Kapil Sibal announced 14 innovation universites that would be of global repute.

In my earlier article published in UWN, I mentioned that some of the visions of world-class universities in India need correction as they are unrealisticly assessing the concept and challenges of "world-class" universities. The end result could be unfulfilled promises and inefficient utilization of resources. Indian higher education system is in need of quality and hence clarity on the approach of building world-class university in the Indian context requires deeper attention. Specifically, I argue that stakeholders are underestimating the resources and leadership required for building world-class universities.

Vendata University advertisement three years back in Samaja. Aiming for 100,000 students and 10,000 faculty members (1 Feb'2007). Click on image.

Resources: Undoubtedly, a world-class universities would require financial resources to put in place a infrastructure and an ability to attract top faculty and students.  Dr. Armstrong of USC in an earlier interview for this blog mentioned that reputation of world-class universities is based on the research component of the university which is facilitated by faculty and students of the highest quality. This aspect of  "human resource", is grossly underestimated in the planning and vision of building world-class universities.

Leadership: Related to human resources is the leadership and academic administration required to achieve global vision. Leading a "world-class" university and a group of experts (faculty) is quite different from leading a business of similar or even larger number of employees. Warren Bennis, chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California notes that "...running a major research university today is far more complex and demanding than running any large, global corporation."

Dr. Richard Levin, President, Yale University said

"...developing world-class universities in Asia will take more than money and determination. To create world-class capacity in research, resources must not only be abundant, they must also be allocated on the basis of scholarly and scientific merit, rather than on the basis of seniority or political influence. To create world-class capacity in education, the curriculum must be broadened and pedagogy transformed. These are all problems that can be solved with sufficient leadership and political will."

India definitely needs a few world-class universities and the ambitions set by some of the recent announcements are in the right direction. These universities would create new benchmarks of quality and help overall system to move up in the quality spectrum. However, attracting, retaining, rewarding and leading academic talent (faculty, students and adminstrators) of "world-class" standards requires understanding of the unique characteristics of education domain and this seems to be grossly underestimated in some of the visions. These visions need to integrate deeper understanding of the characteristics and best practices of building a world-class university, so that they can efficiently use the resources available and realize their full potential.

What are your thoughts? How could India build world-class research university that compare with the best in the world?

- Dr. Rahul Choudaha

Additional Reading:
The Challenge of Establishing World-Class Universities
Philip Altbach on Vedanta University
India's richest man unveils university project
Concept note of Innovation Universities
India to Have 30 World-class Universities Across the Country: PM
Building the world-class university in a developing country
No World Class Universities (WCU) in India?
World-class universities: a new holy grail

Dr. Craig Jeffrey, Oxford University

Dr. Craig Jeffrey
University Lecturer in Human Geography, Oxford University
Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford

Craig Jeffrey is Fellow and Tutor in Geography at St. John’s College, Oxford and teaches human geography in the School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University.  Craig’s research focuses on youth, politics, and education in India and he has spent over four years in north India since 1996, carrying out social research in Hindi and Urdu. He has co-written two books: Degrees Without Freedom? Education, Masculinities and Unemployment in North India (Stanford University Press 2008) and Telling Young Lives: Portraits in Global Youth (Temple University Press 2008), and he has another book forthcoming - Timepass: Waiting, Micro-Politics, and the Indian Middle Classes (Stanford University Press  2010). Craig has also written numerous papers in leading geography, development, anthropology, and area studies journals - see his website for a complete list. Craig is currently co-editing a book series on Global Youth with Temple University Press. He also has a keen interest in developing new teaching innovations, for example around role play and field research.

Rahul- Please share highlights of your forthcoming book -Timepass: Waiting, Micropolitics and the Indian Middle Classes- and how does it relate to Indian education and society?
Dr. Jeffrey- My new book with Stanford University Press examines middle class power, everyday politics and the social experience of "waiting" through reference to Jats in Uttar Pradesh, India. It will interest anthropologists, geographers, development scholars, and anyone concerned to better understand modern India. In the 1990s and 2000s, prosperous Jat farmers and Jat university students were reproducing their power through co-opting the local state: influencing government bureaucrats, in the case of many farmers, or establishing themselves as youth “fixers”, in the case of Jat young men. At the same time, unemployment has become so ubiquitous in the north Indian city of Meerut that Jats, low castes and Muslims all experience prolonged joblessness; they imagine themselves as people “just passing time” (“doing timepass”). United by their shared sense of timelessness, Jats, low castes and Muslims sometimes launch collective protests against the state.

The book therefore documents in rich detail both the mechanisms through which class inequalities are reproduced in provincial India and the "key moments" when young people forge alliances across caste and class divides. Conceptually, these points illustrate the possibilities and limits of Pierre Bourdieu's social theory for understanding Indian social life.

Rahul- In your earlier book, Degrees Without Freedom?, you have discussed the intricate relationship between education, society and poverty in Uttar Pradesh. What are the top two recommendations you have for addressing the problem of educated unemployed youth in India?
Dr. Jeffrey- My top two recommendations for addressing unemployment are as follows:

A. Stop regarding poverty and unemployment as "problems" somehow external to what is happening in the West. The ability of people to lead comfortable and secure lives in the West is intricately linked to the reproduction of unemployment and poverty in places such as India. There are no quick-fix technical solutions to the issue.

B. What might work is a combination of determined advocacy on behalf of the poor, institutional reform (for example preventing politicians from spending money on elections), and reform of the education system to better reflect the needs of north Indian young people.

Rahul- You have been actively engaged with conducting research in India. Please share your experiences as a international researcher in India. What were some of the challenges you faced?
Dr. Jeffrey- Language is an obvious barrier, but I am now fluent in Hindi. I have found people enormously generous with their time. I have learnt a great deal from the generosity and kindness of people in north India.

Dr. Lloyd Armstrong, University of Southern California

Dr. Lloyd Armstrong, Jr.

University Professor
University of Southern California
blog: Changing Higher Education

Dr. Lloyd Armstrong, Jr. is a University Professor at the University of Southern California, and holds appointments in the Rossier School of Education and the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.  His research focuses on the research university of the future, with particular emphasis on the globalization of higher education.  Armstrong was provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs of the University of Southern California from 1993 until 2005.  Prior to coming to USC, Armstrong was on the physics faculty at the Johns Hopkins University from 1969 to 1993, and was dean of the school of arts and sciences 1987 to 1993. He received a B.S in physics from MIT, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley.  He has served on advisory boards for the NSF, the National Research Council, the U.S Army, the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB, the Institute for Theoretical Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics at Harvard, the California Council of Science and Technology, the Southern California Economic Partnership, and the Pacific Council on International Affairs. More about Dr. Armstrong.

Rahul- Recently Mukesh Ambani of Reliance announced building a world class university and Vedanta University had been working on its ambitious project for more than three years. How realistic do you think these visions are? What does it take to build a world-class university from scratch?
Lloyd- There is no set definition for a “world class university”; rather, the term describes an institution whose reputation for excellence is well known by pertinent groups of people (academics, industrialists, students, government agents, etc.) around the world.   Very importantly, this reputation essentially always is based on the research component of the university, not the teaching component.  It does, however, typically also imply that the incoming students are of the very highest quality as judged by international standards.

Vedanta clearly will have many obstacles to overcome in order to achieve this status.  Cost will provide one major obstacle: creating a world class university from scratch is enormously expensive, especially if the goal is to serve a large number of students. Final construction costs for the newest UC campus (30,000 students) have been reported to be in the region of $2B.  The annual budgets for many US institutions in the world-class category are of the order of $.5B-$1B for operating expenses, with an additional $1B-$3B in research funding.   Faculty who are capable of doing research at a world class level are relatively unusual, and thus globally a scarce resource.  Because of global competition for their services, they can demand very high salaries and state of the art research equipment.  Consequently, Institutional start- up expenses for individual new faculty often are in the multi-million dollar range.

Vedanta aspires to be world class, and to have 100,000 students.   If one follows the paradigm defined by the present world class universities, that is an almost impossible combination. It is highly unlikely that any institution could hire– and support – enough world class research- intensive faculty to teach 100,000 students.   It is also unlikely that Vedanta could attract 100,000 students of quality that would be qualified as “excellent” by international standards. In order to be viewed as world class, Vedanta would have to find a way to reconcile these desires that are outside the current paradigm.  In any case, hiring enough world class researchers simply to become visible globally will be a huge challenge for Vedanta, because typically the type researchers it needs to hire will have many choices that are in well established institutions in or near major cities.

Around the world, there are many institutions that are seeking to become “world class”.  For many of those institutions, this may not be the best way to serve their regions and their people. World class institutions cannot provide major benefits to their regions unless there is in place a “pyramid” of higher educational opportunities, with the world class institutions at the pinnacle.   That is, there must be ample opportunity to obtain a solid advanced education for the vast majority of students who will not have the incoming credentials expected of students in the world class university.   Without the critical large base of educated workers that that group provides, a world class university can provide little “value added” to a region.

Rahul- You have had a significant university leadership experience as the USC Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs during the period 1993 until 2005. What advice do you have for administrators aspiring for leadership positions? How could they prepare themselves for the future responsibilities?
Lloyd- One learns leadership by doing leadership.  That is, one prepares oneself for higher leadership positions by taking on lower level leadership roles as they become available, and working hard and creatively to assure the most positive outcomes possible.  This process might begin with accepting committee chairmanships at the university level, or in professional societies, then advancing to department chairmanships and then deanships.   One learns new things about leadership – and about oneself - with each experience.  In particular, conditions often change, leading to significant challenges in a position that are quite different from those that were anticipated.  Rising to those new challenges and using them as opportunities for creation of new levels of institutional excellence is a test of leadership -and an important part of the learning curve for upward-bound managers

Rahul- You edit one of the most popular blogs on international education--Changing Higher Education on globalization and higher education.  Please share what are the top two trends you are witnessing in the field of global higher education?
Lloyd- The biggest trend in global higher education is – more of the same.  We have seen very large increases in the number of students getting some part of their education outside of their native country. The US, which has traditionally been the country of choice for such transnational educational experiences, is losing (relatively) its attraction.  Some of this decrease in attractiveness is due to our lack of welcoming posture for non-US citizens.  More important, however, has been the increase in quality higher education opportunities in numerous countries around the world.  Also important in changing the transnational flow of students has been the opening of educational borders in Europe to encourage inter-European student exchange.  We also see increasing numbers of Americans studying abroad for some period of time.   All of this, however, is just increased activity in an area that has existed for a very long time, albeit a very important area.  As such, it stimulates relatively little self reflection in the higher education community.

A major trend of potentially major significance is the opening by institutions based in one country of programs and even campuses in other countries.   Many of these openings have been stimulated by an offer by some country to cover substantially all costs of the new venture.  Others have been opened because market surveys indicated that a profit could be made (sometimes correctly, sometimes in error).  At this point, the vast majority of these examples of transnational education seem to have been done without a clear strategic (rather than tactical) vision of their role in the evolving mission of the institution. However, enough of these ventures are occurring that new conceptualizations of what it means to be a major higher educational establishment in a globalizing world are likely to begin to appear.   That will be exciting!