American colleges have to be in India.
After all, no other country in this century, save China, is likely to be as important geopolitically, financially, demographically, culturally. Globally savvy students ought to study here. There are research opportunities for political scientists and public-health specialists, economists and ethnomusicologists. And, simply put, India, where half of the 1.2-billion-and-growing population is under 30, needs help—building enough universities, wiring enough classrooms, training enough teachers.
“It is a place of such great promise,” says John E. Dooley, who formerly led Virginia Tech’s international efforts, “that you just have to find a way to engage.”
So if collaborating with India is a no-brainer, why are many American colleges finding it a nonstarter? Too often, ambitious plans are scaled back. Agreements languish in drawers, their signatures yellowing. Relationships begun with optimism and promise dissolve in frustration and mistrust. Some college officials, faced with thousands of potential Indian partners, don’t even know where to begin.
Take Timothy Doupnik, vice provost for international programs at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. When Mr. Doupnik accepted the job, the university’s president, noting how many South Carolina professors worked in China, asked: What about India?
“I can take a hint,” deadpanned Mr. Doupnik. So in December, he came to this western Indian city, close to the Pakistan border, on an exploratory mission.
In four days, he visited seven universities across the state of Gujarat. He drank vats of tea. He collected fistfuls of business cards. He shook many hands. And in the end, says Mr. Doupnik, “We might have hit a few singles, maybe. But there were no home runs.”
What happened? For one, South Carolina hoped to recruit students into its graduate programs, but Mr. Doupnik did not realize, until he got to Ahmadabad, that undergraduates in India are generally taught at separate colleges affiliated with larger universities; he had not arranged to visit any colleges. He was seeking partners for South Carolina’s engineering program, but Gujarat’s government had consolidated all engineering schools into a single institution, and it, too, wasn’t on his schedule. None of the campuses he toured had experience hosting international students—not Westerners, anyway. “I couldn’t send our students to study there,” Mr. Doupnik said, after seeing the facilities. At one institution, he was ushered into a conference room with some 30 department chairmen in attendance. By the time each had completed a five-minute presentation, Mr. Doupnik’s head was spinning.
Back in South Carolina, he passed along some leads for joint research to a few deans. But he couldn’t, as he had once envisioned, recommend sending a delegation of faculty members and senior administrators to Gujarat to explore deeper ties. Figuring out a strategy would take more time. A colleague offered Mr. Doupnik a bit of consolation: Even very experienced international officers get tripped up in India.
It’s a head-scratcher. India, in so many ways, seems like a natural fit for American colleges. Like the United States, it’s a free-market democracy with a diverse populace. It’s English-speaking. More than 100,000 Indian students, most at the graduate level, now study in the United States, second just to China, and the faculty ranks of American universities are chockablock with Indian-born professors. What’s more, American involvement in higher education on the subcontinent dates back decades, to the early days of Indian independence, when American universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon helped start some of India’s best, among them the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology.
China, by contrast, is controlled, centralized, and, at least nominally, Communist. It was off-limits to Western universities until the 1980s; before that, Chinese universities were shuttered for a decade during the Cultural Revolution. Today’s flood of Chinese students to the West was but a trickle several years ago, and few of those students retained ties home.
Yet China is far ahead of India in international engagement. It sends nearly double the number of students to the United States and plays host to more than three times as many Americans than does India. It boasts collaborative research projects and joint-degree programs and robust faculty exchanges. There are centers for China study on campuses across the United States. Prominent American institutions, like Duke University and New York University, are setting up branches in China—something that the government in India has never OK’d.
Money is a factor, of course. But what really holds American and Indian universities back, despite goodwill and good intentions, are missteps and misunderstandings. Cultural misperceptions. A mismatch of interests.
“There are a lot of instances,” says Rahul Choudaha, director of research and advisory services at World Education Services, a nonprofit group that specializes in evaluating foreign credentials and trends, “of institutions getting their fingers burned.”
Bound by Bureaucracy
This fall, Virginia Tech held a groundbreaking ceremony on a plot of land near Chennai, an industrial hub on India’s southeast coast.
The event was a long time coming: The university first set its sights on India nearly a decade ago, calling it a keystone of its global ambitions. Under those plans, Virginia Tech-Chennai would have offered graduate degrees in much-in-demand fields like engineering and business.
But no classes will be held in the state-of-the-art building now under construction. Instead the 6,000-square-foot facility will serve solely as a research center, bringing professors and graduate students from the United States and India together with local industry. It is expected to open this spring.
Even as the university moves ahead with its research efforts, Guru Ghosh, associate vice president for international affairs, says Virginia Tech “still wants to be one of the first foreign universities to offer degrees in India.”
When that will be, however, is anyone’s guess. Although some 630 foreign universities were operating in India as of 2010, according to the Association of Indian Universities, they do so without any legislative authority, making it all but impossible for graduates to get jobs in the public sector or enroll in Indian graduate programs. A bill giving outside universities the right to set up campuses and offer degrees on Indian soil has been bottled up in Parliament for years. At work is a combination of forces, including a resistance to foreign providers of any stripe—global retailers like Wal-Mart have faced similar legal roadblocks to entering the Indian market.
The limbo has had an impact, and not just on Virginia Tech. Georgia Tech, too, has downgraded its aspirations in India. Rather than establishing an Indian outpost, the university is opting to focus on joint research projects while looking into online-degree programs. Setting up a full-fledged campus will wait for legislation, says Vijay K. Madisetti, an engineering professor who leads Georgia Tech’s India effort.
Regulatory uncertainty was one factor in Champlain College’s decision to wind down its Mumbai campus, where it offered degrees and sponsored study-abroad students from its home campus, in Vermont. And Parliament’s indecision has kept other institutions, like Indiana’s Valparaiso University, on the sidelines, hesitant to move ahead with plans that might be scuttled.
“A lot of universities are in a holding pattern,” says Adrian Mutton, chief executive of Sannam S4, a company that advises foreign institutions on their India strategy. “They’re waiting for landing gear to bring them down.”
Even if the bill does eventually pass, it could impose conditions so onerous—limiting the number of foreign faculty or prohibiting revenues from leaving the country—that few institutions may be willing to meet them.
In that sense, the foreign-university measure is really a high-profile illustration of why it can be so difficult for universities to do business in India: namely, its often-suffocating bureaucracy. While few institutions are willing to risk reputation and resources to set up an overseas campus, red tape can hinder even the most basic international work. Rules restrict faculty travel abroad. A highly regimented credit system at many universities prevents students from taking courses outside of their fields and makes it difficult for foreign-exchange students to transfer credits back home. Forget medical research—the sharing of biological materials, like blood or tissue samples, is prohibited. Getting approval for a single new course, never mind a joint-degree program, can take months or years.
India’s private universities, which have proliferated in the last decade or so, are less constrained by regulations, but they differ widely in quality and are not as well known abroad.
Further complicating matters are state regulations that can contradict or compound national ones (as in the United States, states have direct oversight of public universities). Several Indian states are moving to pass legislation that would permit branch campuses, even if the federal government restricts them.
Says William B. Lacy, vice provost for university outreach and international programs at the University of California at Davis, “India inherited the worst of British bureaucracy.”
International Baggage
Of course, foreign partners bring their own baggage. Just ask Yogesh Singh.
Mr. Singh likes the visitors, welcomes them—the university delegations from Florida, Virginia, and New Mexico; Britain, Germany, and Canada. In fact, it was his idea to set up the first international office at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda shortly after he became vice chancellor, 18 months ago.
It’s just that Mr. Singh can’t help wishing that his overseas guests had a somewhat different agenda. “Joint research,” he says, with the tiniest edge of exasperation. “That’s what everyone talks about.”
To Mr. Singh, the trouble with research is that it has limited impact. It touches the researcher, a collaborator or two, a few graduate assistants. Academic exchanges, he argues, sending professors abroad to teach and bringing in foreign faculty to share new pedagogy, have more far-reaching consequences because they change what goes on in the classroom. They have an institutional effect, particularly among younger faculty.
“Our students will be exposed to fresh and different air,” Mr. Singh says.
“After the teaching,” he adds, “research will come.”
Actually, faculty members at the Gujarati institution are already engaged in plenty of international research. Sarita Gupta, head of the biochemistry department, has even turned research connections into a visiting-scientist program, which brings in guest lecturers for a week at a time to give talks and to work alongside Ph.D. students. It has attracted professors from the University of Tennessee, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Laval University, in Quebec. Some of Ms. Gupta’s students have later spent time doing research in the visitors’ labs.
But that makes MSU-Baroda, its graceful towers and vaulted domes giving the campus an air of worn majesty, somewhat unusual. Relatively little research is done at Indian universities; instead it is spun off into separate institutes and centers. At most universities, teaching is faculty members’ main focus; if professors do research, it’s a passion project.
That’s in sharp contrast to major universities in America, where research is king. Indeed, notes Philip G. Altbach, director of the Center of International Higher Education at Boston College, a disproportionate share of the American institutions that are most active overseas are research-intensive universities. But a country in which only a handful of institutions conduct much research at all, and just one ranks among the world’s top 500 research universities (China, by comparison, has 28), offers few obvious partners.
For many Indian university leaders, focusing on research is an unimagined luxury when they have such pressing needs in the classroom.
“There aren’t enough seats, there aren’t enough universities,” says Duleep C. Deosthale, vice president for international education at Manipal Education, a private education provider. “There’s always not enough.”
The scope is staggering: Just 20 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds get any kind of postsecondary schooling.
At the same time, observers worry that instruction in the current system is inadequate. Courses of study are narrow and rigid. Syllabi are antiquated, and professors teach by rote. Employers complain that the graduates they get aren’t up to the jobs.
“Our faculty need to learn to teach differently,” says P.J. Lavakare, a former executive director of the U.S. Educational Foundation in India.
But transforming academic culture isn’t easy, and few institutions have resources for faculty development. A number of American universities have reached out to assist: Yale is training university administrators. Rutgers has teamed up with an Indian partner, the Tata Institute for Social Sciences, to start a center dedicated to best practices in India’s underdeveloped vocational-education sector. Building on its long history in joint agricultural research, Cornell is aiding two Indian institutions in creating degree programs in the field, with plans to exchange students and professors. Such collaborations, however, remain relatively small in number and narrow in scope, making little dent in India’s yawning demand.
John L. Wood, senior associate vice president for international education at the University at Buffalo, says he’s keenly aware of the need for better training and has encouraged partner institutions in India to send doctoral students or young faculty members to the State University of New York campus. But frequently the expense is too great. And there’s another problem, he says: Sometimes they don’t want to go home.
Selling the Faculty
The trouble is compounded by the fact that getting American faculty members to go to India can be a tough sell. For the kind of overseas partnerships needed in India, faculty indifference can be a deal-breaker. After all, academic exchanges and professional mentoring rise and fall on faculty commitment.
Take Rollins College, in central Florida. It is a small, liberal-arts college dedicated to teaching, with an ambition to go global and a history of sending faculty members abroad. Oh, yeah, and it counts one of India’s most famous public figures, Rahul Gandhi, the son and grandson of presidents, among its alumni. Sounds perfect for this work, right? Not exactly.
Rollins’s foray into India has happened in fits and starts. The president, Lewis M. Duncan, returned from a trip energized by the possibility of working in India.
So far, though, that enthusiasm hasn’t reached the faculty, which has made progress slow. “The bottleneck is faculty buy-in,” says Ilan Alon, an international-business professor who is leading Rollins’s effort.
For many professors, there may simply be no clear incentive for doing this kind of work—tenure and academic reputation are, at the end of the day, heavily influenced by research and publications, not by global engagement.
At the University of Tulsa, Cheryl Matherly, vice provost for global education, says a large part of her work has been educating people on the campus. “We just didn’t have to make the case to engage in China,” she says, “the way we have to with India.”
The truth is, working in India can be demanding. Laboratories and classrooms are often spartan. Technology can be outdated or nonexistent. Health concerns are real—a third of the Rollins professors on an exploratory visit fell ill.
For Mr. Singh, of MSU-Baroda, it’s disappointing not to have attracted more visiting professors. After all, he points out, it would be easy enough for foreign faculty members to spend a few weeks or a month there during their summer vacations or semester breaks.
The issue, he says bluntly, is that American professors don’t want to teach in India. “It’s the mind-set,” he says.
It might be natural, then, to turn to Indian-born faculty members. But depending on expatriates can be chancy, says Nick Booker, who leads a Delhi-based education consulting firm, IndoGenius. After all, these professors typically left India as graduate students; their academic careers have been in America. “They don’t know Indian universities today,” Mr. Booker says.
The India-Whisperers
Instead, some institutions have concluded that if they’re truly committed to working in India, they need a guide, some kind of local presence.
Roger N. Brindley, associate vice president for global academic programs at the University of South Florida, works in both India and China and says that, in many ways, he finds the latter country easier to navigate, despite the linguistic differences. “Yes, they speak Mandarin in China,” he says, “but it’s in India that you need an interpreter.”
For South Florida, that interpreter is Sannam S4.
The company’s offices are in Nehru Place, a Delhi commercial center, in a tower that rises above the sepia haze choking the city. Two walls of the cheerful reception area are covered with university seals and crests, arranged in tidy rows, most from Britain.
For all intents and purposes, this is the Indian office of all these universities. About a third of Sannam’s clients are in education.
To reach the office of Mr. Mutton, the chief executive, a visitor wends around a warren of cubbies and small glass-fronted rooms, each stenciled with the name of a city, or, more precisely, a college town. Each Sannam S4 staff member is hired by and reports to a home university.
Previously, the India “office” of many overseas universities would have been run out of an alumnus’s spare bedroom, Mr. Mutton says. Or institutions would have tried to manage such work from afar, with officials jetting in several times a year for a meeting-o-rama.
Behind a door marked “Tampa” is South Florida’s eyes and ears on the ground in India. Mr. Brindley hopes that having a local representative will help it avoid big mistakes and smaller hiccups. Now, when he travels to India, the campuses he visits have been vetted by local staff to determine their partnership potential. “Otherwise I’m on a fishing trip, aren’t I?” Mr. Brindley says. South Florida, which signed on with Sannam a year ago, is moving cautiously but is close to signing two agreements.
With some 33,000 Indian colleges and universities, public and private, finding the right partner is no easy task. Too often, American and Indian institutions alike default to working with brand-name universities. But the Harvards and the Indian Institutes of Technology can handle only so many partners, and some lesser-known institutions might be a better match.
Anita Patankar, director of the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, one of the country’s young private institutions, recalls meeting an American who brusquely enumerated the reasons his college couldn’t work in India: no critical thinking, minimal class discussion, little instruction in the humanities. “Excuse me?” Ms. Patankar said, telling the man her institution does all three.
In Gujarat, one of the state’s newest institutions, Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University, also has a school for liberal arts, along with degrees in perhaps likelier disciplines, such as engineering and petroleum management. From its founding, six years ago, by the state oil corporation, PDPU has emphasized applied research and international collaboration; already a number of promising projects are under way, including joint research with institutions like Georgia Tech and a three-week summer program that sends top undergraduates to several American universities.
Indian and American universities need time to build trust, to cultivate strong, durable relationships, says D.J. Pandian, a founder of the Gujarati university and the state’s principal secretary of energy. “It cannot be an arranged marriage.”
Taking the Long View
Want a reminder of what’s at stake, why universities on both sides persevere despite the obstacles? Go for a taxi ride in Ahmadabad.
It’s a gloriously sunny day, but much of this city of five and a half million is still sleeping off the previous night’s Navratri festivities, when Hindus dance until dawn in praise of the goddess Durga. With the city’s normally congested streets free-flowing, Mohinder decides to take his passenger on an impromptu tour.
“That, ma’am, is Gujarat University. And that over there, that is CEPT University. C-E-P-T. It is for architecture, for the planning of cities. And IIM, Indian Institute of Management. Do you know it? It is one of the best universities in all of India. It is excellent.” Almost absent-mindedly the taxi driver points out what guidebooks would deem Ahmadabad’s most notable site, the ashram where Mahatma Gandhi and his followers led an austere existence while agitating for Indian independence.
Mohinder has had little formal schooling. He learned English—the native tongue here is Gujarati—by ferrying visitors to one of the city’s handful of Western hotels. Yet he believes passionately in the importance of education. Perhaps one day, he tells his customer (a “junior businesswoman,” he surmises), his two young daughters will be like the girls he sees scurrying across the university road, thin frames bent beneath heavy backpacks. “Then they will have good lives.”
As it happens, Mohinder’s confidence in education’s transformative potential is echoed by some of the most powerful people in Gujarat. The government of this thriving, business-minded state is making improving its universities a top priority, and it’s bringing in foreign universities to assist. “We want a society propelled by the best minds,” says Hasmukh Adhia, the state’s principal secretary for education. “We don’t want to be a manufacturing economy that produces something the U.S. has discovered. We want our own innovation.”
A sign pinned to the wall in Mr. Adhia’s office reads: “You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.” Already the government has built a high-tech center where professors and administrators from foreign universities can work for weeks at a time. Gujarat has loosened restrictions on faculty travel and is considering a small surcharge on land purchases to support international joint research.
Last month Mr. Adhia and his colleagues put on a conference that brought in representatives of more than 100 universities from the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. Part show-and-tell about the state, part match-making session, the two-day meeting was capped by a ceremony in which many Gujarati and foreign universities inked agreements, with the chief minister, Narendra Modi, looking down beatifically from a flowered dais.
But Gujarat has resources, financial and otherwise, that few other Indian states, struggling to meet basic needs, possess. And even here there are difficulties. PDPU, for example, goes begging for faculty members who are also strong researchers; most who fit that description go abroad or take more-lucrative private-sector jobs. At MSU-Baroda, there’s no budget for the visiting-scientist program, so it attracts only those professors who are willing to pay their own way or were coming to India anyway. “We can only offer good hospitality to them,” Ms. Gupta, the director, says.
For many American universities, the future may indeed include India, but they need to be prepared for a long and difficult road. Opening Indian universities to international collaboration will continue to be a demanding chore, and preparing Americans to work here a challenge. Mr. Altbach, the Boston College researcher, has been working in India for half a century. Asked if he expects more change and greater international collaboration anytime soon, he sighs. “On balance,” he says, “not a whole hell of a lot.”
Big Plans Meet Reality on the Subcontinent
American colleges have big ambitions in India. But often their initial efforts hit obstacles, forcing them to rethink their approaches. Here’s some of what is—and isn’t—going on in the subcontinent:
Click on the icons for more information on the various institutions
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Correction (2/12/2013, 2:16 p.m.): This article originally misidentified the University of Tulsa’s Cheryl Matherly as associate dean for global education. She is vice provost for global education. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
