As a young boy, in India, Pradeep K. Khosla was told by his parents that he could become one of two things when he grew up: an engineer or a doctor.
Mr. Khosla came to the United States in 1982 to study electrical and computer engineering as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. After earning a doctorate, he climbed the ranks of American academe, becoming a tenured professor, department head, and dean at Carnegie Mellon, and, last year, chancellor of the University of California at San Diego.
When Mr. Khosla first arrived in America, “the possibility for an Indian academic to lead a top-notch institution was nonexistent,” he says. “You looked around, and there were no leadership opportunities in higher education for someone like me.”
Since then much has changed. Mr. Khosla is now among a small but growing cohort of academics of Indian descent who have risen to the presidential ranks in American higher education.
In addition to Mr. Khosla, other Indian-born scholars who have become leaders of American institutions in the past two years include Subra Suresh, at Carnegie Mellon; Vistasp M. Karbhari, at the University of Texas at Arlington; Virinder K. Moudgil, at Lawrence Technological University; and Kumble R. Subbaswamy, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Presidents and search consultants say a variety of factors—including the changing immigration patterns of Indian-born academics, a greater openness toward minority and nontraditional candidates in the presidential search process, and a growing pipeline of Indian scholars in the American academy—are behind the recent rise in appointments.
“Academics from that part of the world seem to bring to the table great analytical and mathematical strengths, and to their credit they have learned the American system of shared governance,” says Jamie P. Ferrare, managing principal at AGB Search, a higher-education consulting firm. “If you combine those two strengths in a presidential search, that’s pretty potent.”
If Satish K. Tripathi had come to the United States in the 1950s or 60s, he probably would not be where he is today, he says.
Mr. Tripathi, who grew up in India and became the University at Buffalo’s first foreign-born president, in 2011, says the rise in Indian-born presidents is a natural result of academic-immigration patterns over the past four decades.
For years, many Indian students came to the United States for graduate study, but most returned home after earning their degrees. Then, in the 1970s, things started to change. Indian students began joining the faculties of American institutions, in part because of the superior opportunities for engineering research there.
“If you look at the influx of Indian students who came and stayed in the 1970s,” Mr. Tripathi says, “then these presidential appointments seem to be a natural progression from that.” The pipeline is maturing, he says, and it is starting to deliver.
Because scholars of Indian descent often get lumped into more general “Asian” categories, there are no precise data on the number of college presidents and chancellors among them. According to the American Council on Education, Asian-Americans made up just 1.5 percent of presidents and chancellors in 2011, compared with 8.8 percent of the United States’ full-time tenured faculty.
The recent uptick in Indian-born presidents falls in line with a substantial rise in the number of people of Indian descent living in the United States. According to the Census Bureau, that group, which it categorizes as “Asian Indians,” numbered about 3.2 million in 2010, the third-largest Asian community in the country.
While the total U.S. population increased by 9.7 percent from 2000 to 2010, the nation’s Asian population grew by 43 percent during that same time. The Asian-Indian population has grown by nearly 70 percent over the past decade, according to the Census Bureau.
Indian-born academics tend to cluster in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), which can sometimes give them a leg up in presidential searches, says R. William Funk, founder and president of R. William Funk & Associates, a higher-education-consulting firm. Since the 2008 recession, says AGB Search’s Mr. Ferrare, governing boards have been more focused on benchmarks and quantitative results, and STEM-educated candidates can often deliver those results.
Their international perspective is another attractive attribute of candidates of Indian descent, says Jamshed Bharucha, an Indian-born academic who became president of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2011. In recent years, he says, India has been a hot spot for Cooper Union’s global outreach.
“There are always cultural barriers when you try to create institutional partnerships across countries,” Mr. Bharucha says. “Having one foot in both cultures can help to break down some of those barriers.”
When Renu Khator delivered her inaugural address as president of the University of Houston, in 2008, she made history by becoming the first Indian-born academic to lead a major American research institution.
Ms. Khator, who concluded her address in 2008 with a poem from Rabindranath Tagore, one of India’s foremost poets and the first Asian to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature, says she has faced challenges as a female, foreign-born academic.
“In order for me to be perceived as equal, because I’m a woman, I have to work 110 percent,” she says. “And I have to put in another 10 percent because I’m foreign-born and speak with a foreign accent.”
Language barriers can be a problem for Indian-born candidates in presidential searches, says Mr. Khosla, chancellor at San Diego. “If you have a heavy accent, that’s not going to work to your advantage for a job that requires constant communication.”
The challenges faced by Indian-born academics can begin early. For example, when Mr. Subbaswamy, of UMass, came to the United States for graduate study, he found the American higher-education system to be jarring. “The Indian system seemed much more structured,” he says. “Back at home, the concept of electives didn’t even exist.”
Mr. Karbhari, who became president of Texas at Arlington this year, had a similar first impression. When he was growing up, his father worked at a civil-engineering firm in India, a job that required the family to move frequently—Mumbai, Pune, and Bangalore, among other places. The idea that he would one day lead an American university never crossed Mr. Karbhari’s mind.
Despite the progress that Indian-born academics have made, Indian-born administrators as a whole are still predominantly male, and few of them hold degrees outside of business or STEM fields.
“It’s been remarkable to watch the growth in the administrative ranks,” Ms. Khator says. “But there’s still a long way to go.”
