The Pursuit of Prestige

ScoreS of factorS on the Index of Importance

F O R L e a d e R s i n h i g h e R e d u c a t i O n

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3 lakh teachers needed in

higher education,

says HRD Ministry

mJ xavIer, director, IIm ranchi, feels that industry-government-academia linkages are critical for building prestige

ShaShI GUlhatI, ceo, edcil, says students must be the centre of the faculty’s universe. They must be initiated into research

Bala v Balachandran, founder & dean, Great lakes, chennai, says attitude and ethical consciousness of students in contributing to society is a key factor in the pursuit of prestige

Able institutional leadership for vision and planning scored 98 on the index of

importance

PResTige facToRs

99Faculty

94Academic

Programmes

93Students

89Institutional

Administration

87Technology

Usage

86Building &

Infrastructure

93Research

77Stakeholder Participation

88Financing &

Funding

83Collaborations

respondents said

qualification and

experience of the faculty

is very important

84%

volUme 02 ISSUe 09 150a 9.9 medIa pUBlIcatIon

SeptemBer 2011www.edU-leaderS.com

PursuitThe

ofPrestigeWhat it takes to reach the top...eDU finds out pg 18

Technology Thin clients can have fat

benefits p50

AcAdemicsIntegrated BBA-cum-MBA

programmes: Need of the hour? p44

PersPecTive

Pankaj Jalote, Director, IIIT Delhi, on quality education p64

FOREWORD

1September 2011 EduTEch

Dr Pramath Raj [email protected]

What is prestige?

“Clearly, the survey reflects the reality of students’ aspirations and, therefore, your focus as higher education leaders”

Everyone, who wants a higher education degree, wants to get it from a presti-gious institution. Understandably, all higher educational institutions would like to be counted among the prestigious halls of learning. While we all have a sense of what that means, we, at EDU, decided to take a more deliberate

approach to examine what constitutes prestige for an academic institution. We sent you a survey and got an overwhelming 530 responses (at the last count). While it

is not surprising that faculty and academic programmes emerged as the top drivers of pres-tige, it is interesting to see your perspectives on the key factors that influence these drivers. For example, when prioritising the stakeholder factors that drive prestige, you noticeably placed ranking in surveys at the bottom of the list. In fact, you emphatically voted that it is the quality of companies coming for on-campus recruitment that is the biggest of the stake-holder factors driving reputation. Clearly, the survey reflects the reality of students’ aspira-tions and, therefore, your focus as higher education leaders in the context of our country. Similarly, it is interesting that you believe getting your website right is more important than providing interactive blackboards when prioritising technology factors driving prestige.

The findings of the survey are the subject of our cover story this month and also provide the backdrop for EDU’s first annual Vice Chancellors’ Retreat, being held this weekend at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad. We were inspired by the book, In Pursuit of Prestige, co-authored by Charles Goldman of the Rand Corporation, in setting the theme for the survey and the VCs’ Retreat. Dr Goldman is an expert on higher education in the US and will be a keynote speaker at the Retreat. And for the Indian perspective, who better to kick off the Retreat than Andre Beteille, one of the foremost thinkers of our times and author of Universities at Crossroads, a seminal piece of work on the evolution of India’s universities? Looking forward to Hyderabad!

2 EduTEch September 2011

ContentsSeptember 2011EDU

update 04 LAUNCH05 APPOINTMENT VISA FRAUD06 EXAMINATION JUDGEMENT07 REVISION SCHOLARSHIP

Viewpoints08 RAHUL CHOUDAHAAcademic Leadership Beyond Bottom Line

10 RISHIkESHA T kRISHNANWanted Sutradharas of Social Change

expertise14 VIJAY SHUkLA & PANkAJ AGARwALEducation Reforms on Anvil

Campus38 DESIGNING A DIFFERENCECan architecture enhance learning?By Teja Lele Desai

aCademiCs44 GROOMING YOUNG MbA LEADERSShaping young undergraduates through integrated BBA-cum-MBA programmesBy Charu Bahri

teChnology50 THIN CLIENT, FAT bENEFITSHigher education institutes can reap the benefits of going lean with thin clients 51 TECH SNIPPETS54 TECH TUTES

global perspeCtiVe Find out what’s happening in varsities around the world through The Chronicle of Higher Education

56 SCIENTISTS TAP COLUMbIA’S bIODIVERSITY TO bOOST DEVELOPMENTBy Steven Ambrus

58 LATIN AMERICAN NATIONS PUSH STUDENTS AbROADBy Andrew Downie

60 EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES CONCERNED AbOUT FUNDSBy Aisha Labi

perspeCtiVe64 qUALITY EDUCATION IS COSTLYBy Pankaj Jalote

50

“Quality research will happen only when there is an urge to discover something”—T RamasamiSecretary, Govt of India, Dept of Science & Technology

32

63


timeout62 bOOkS• Lowering Higher Education: The Rise Of Corporate Universities And The Fall Of Liberal Education• The New Digital Shoreline • University Rankings

63 TECH INSIDER• New Ways of News

63 GIzMOS & GADGETS• AstroClip for your iPhone• Sony DSC-TX55 Digital Camera

this index is provided as an additional service. the publisher does not assume

any liabilities for errors or omissions.

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panaSonIC bC

SCORES OF FACTORS ON THE INDEX OF IMPORTANCE

F O R L E A D E R S I N H I G H E R E D U C A T I O N

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.CO

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3 lakh teachers needed in

higher education,

says HRD Ministry

MJ XAVIER, Director, IIM Ranchi, feels that industry-government-academia linkages are critical for building prestige

SHASHI GULHATI, CEO, EdCil, says students must be the centre of the faculty’s universe. They must be initiated into research

BALA V BALACHANDRAN, Founder & Dean, Great Lakes, Chennai, says attitude and ethical consciousness of students in contributing to society is a key factor in the pursuit of prestige

Able institutional leadership for vision and planning scored 98 on the index of

importance

PRESTIGE FACTORS

99Faculty

94Academic

Programmes

93Students

89Institutional

Administration

87Technology

Usage

86Building &

Infrastructure

93Research

77Stakeholder Participation

88Financing &

Funding

83Collaborations

respondents said

qualification and

experience of the faculty

is very important

84%

VOLUME 02 ISSUE 09 150A 9.9 MEDIA PUBLICATION

SEPTEMBER 2011WWW.EDU-LEADERS.COM

PursuitThe

ofPrestigeWhat it takes to reach the top...EDU finds out Pg 18

TECHNOLOGY Thin clients can have fat

benefits P50

ACADEMICSIntegrated BBA-cum-MBA

programmes: Need of the hour? P44

PERSPECTIVE

Pankaj Jalote, Director, IIIT Delhi, on quality education P64

CoVER ART: AniL vk

CoVer story

18 the pursuit of prestigeWhat it takes to reach the top...EDU finds out

23 Faculty24 academic programmes25 students26 research27 institutional administration28 technology usage29 building & infrastructure30 Collaborations

31 stakeholder participation

MAnAging DirECTor: Pramath raj SinhaPUBLiSHing DirECTor: Anuradha Das MathurgroUP EDiTor: r giridharEDiToriAL DirECTor: Mala BhargavaMAnAging EDiTor: Sangita Thakur varmaConSULTing EDiTor: inga Butefisch ASSiSTAnT EDiTor: Smita PoliteASSiSTAnT fEATUrES EDiTor: rohini BanerjeeConTriBUTing EDiTor: Aniha BrarSUB EDiTorS: ruhi Ahuja, radhika Haswani, Mitia nath

designSr. CrEATivE DirECTor: Jayan k narayananArT DirECTorS: Binesh Sreedharan & Anil vkASSoCiATE ArT DirECTor: PC AnoopviSUALiSErS: Prasanth Tr & Anil TSr DESignErS: Joffy Jose, nv BaijuChander Dange & Sristi Maurya DESignErS: Suneesh k, Shigil n & Charu DwivediCHiEf PHoTogrAPHEr: Subhojit PaulPHoTogrAPHEr: Jiten gandhi

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from the world of higher education


05 Appointment 05 visA frAud 06 exAminAtion 06

judgement 07 revision 07 scholArship & more

launch: India and Australia have announced the launch of an education council to strengthen exchanges between the two nations. “We decided to start the India-Australia Education Council last year in April,” Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said, after meeting Australian Tertiary Education Minister Chris Evans, in New Delhi.

A meeting of vice chancellors of about 30 universities from the two countries was also held in New Delhi. “We are looking forward to expanding the relations and increasing the people-to-people, and institution-to-institution contact,” Evans said.

The university-level collaboration would include degree recognition, credit transfer, and collaboration in postgraduate and research programmes. Asked about the issue of safety of Indian students in Australia, Evans said special steps have been taken to ensure that. “We did have some issues, but now the students express high satisfaction,” he said.

India-Australia Education CouncilThe university-level collaboration would include degree recognition, credit transfer, and postgraduate and research programmes

collaboration: HRD Minister Kapil Sibal with Australian Tertiary Minister Chris Evans at the launch of the joint council to facilitate higher education

coTTon collEgE columbia varsiTy TiE-up Assam’s premier Cotton College,

recently upgraded to a state

university, has tied up with and

Columbia University of United

States to benefit from its

knowledge and expertise in

development projects.A team of

Columbia officials, led by its

Director of Earth Institute and

Professor of Health Policy and

Management, Jeffrey Sachs, visited

the 110-year-old college campus to chalk

out plans for collaboration with the

university. A group of teachers and

researchers from Cotton College would work

on the ongoing development projects in

health and education in Morigaon district

along with experts from Columbia University

and officials of the state health department.

iimc To sET up branch in KashmirThe Indian Institute of Mass Communica-

tion (IIMC) is planning to open a branch in

Jammu and Kashmir by next year, said an

official. The institute, which currently has

branches in New Delhi and Dhenkanal in

Orissa, was set up in 1965 on the recom-

mendation of a team of internationally

known mass communication specialists

from UNESCO and the Ford Foundation.

nEw FormaT For caT 2011A new format for CAT 2011 will make belling

the CAT (Common Admission Test) easier

this year. With the same number of questions,

this year’s CAT will have two sections instead

of three, and an extra five minutes. The two

sections are: Quantitative Ability and Data

Interpretation, and Verbal Ability and Logical

Reasoning. A 15-minute tutorial prior to

exams would take the total time to two hours

and 35 minutes. The test is scheduled

between October 22 and November 18, 2011.

update

globalupdate

Visa fraud: Authorities in the US have raided the University of Northern Virginia’s Annandale (UNVA) on charges

of alleged visa fraud. This happened hardly six months after the country’s Tri-Valley University (TVU) was declared a

‘sham university’. Officials found that the university is unaccredited, and has about 2,400 students, 90 per cent of

whom are from India, and a majority from Andhra Pradesh.

Officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Federal Bureau of

Investigation raided the university, which was supposed to issue I-20 forms to about

50 students but issued and enrolled many more.

Unlike the TVU case, the focus of the raid is not the students,

but the school. According to reports, no arrest, detention or

electronic monitoring is being done on the students. The

university was given a one-month notice for explana-

tion. Students can either continue at the university

till the time it functions, or seek transfer to another

university or return to India.

Another US Varsity under the Scanner


appointment: The Governor and Chancellor of universities of Bihar, Deva-nand Konwar, has appointed vice chan-cellors for six universities in the state.

The Director of School of Journalism and New Media Studies of the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), Shambhu Nath Singh, has been appointed the new VC of Patna University.

Retired Hindi professor of Magadh University, Ram Binod Singh, has been appointed as the VC of Jayaprakash University, Chhapra; the registrar of LN Mithila University, Kumar Bimal, takes over as VC of BRA Bihar University, Muzaf fa rpur; and Pr inc ipa l o f

New VCs for Six Bihar VarsitiesPatna University will be headed by Shambhu Nath Singh, Director of IGNOU’s School of Journalism and New Media Studies

students were to be issued the I-20 form by the university50of the 2,400 students in the

university are Indians90%

Brajbhushan Sanskri t College, Gaya, Arvind Pandey, takes charge as the new VC of Kameshwar Singh Darbhanga Sanskrit University. The officiating V C s o f B N M a n d a l University and Maulana Mazhar-ul Haq University, Arun Kumar and S Zoha respectively, have been retained as full-time VCs.

Appointments of VCs in Magadh Uni-versity and Veer Kuer Singh University are likely to be made after the final court verdict on cases relating to appointment of previous incumbents.

According to HRD sources, the Gover-nor did not consult the state government over the appointments. Though express-ing unhappiness over the matter, the state government has said it will not be challenging the Governor’s order.

controversial: The state government was not consulted over the appointments of VCs

update

6 EduTEch September 20116 EduTEch September 2011

examination: Union Minister for Human Resource Development, Kapil Sibal, has said that it is his ‘dream’ to implement a single common entrance exam at the national level by 2013 for admiss ion to eng ineer ing and science colleges.

During an interaction, he said, “My real dream is that by 2013, I should have the first all India test.”

A committee chaired by T Ramasami, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, was constituted to re-look into the test meth-odology of selecting students and have a common system for admission.

The National Aptitude Test aims at reducing psychological and financial stress on students, Sibal said. Ramasami had carried out a study to seek responses

Sibal Dreams of a Common Admission TestThe test aims at reducing psychological and financial stress for the students

for a single test and the result says that 80 per cent of the people in India want the test. No political party has refused to have it.

Under this for-mat, Class XII students will appear for a single aptitude test whose results will be the basis for their admissions, after giving due weightage to the board exam results.

According to reports, when asked about opposition from Tamil Nadu to this move, Sibal said “that is a peculiarly Tamil Nadu legislative decision, which is now being challenged in Madras High Court. That’s entirely different from

having a separate test.”He said if there is an all-India list and

there is an equalisation procedure that takes into account each state board, every child can get admission to the institution of his choice and there will be no capitation fee.

The minister is keen to overhaul the college admission system to make it more realistic.

reforms: The minister hopes to ensure that every child gets admission to an institution of his choice

Judgement: The Supreme Court of India on Tuesday

extended the interim stay against the AICTE notification, issued

on December 28 last year, by another year.

The order has cleared the decks for PGDM institutes in the

country to prepare for a smoother admission process in

2012-14.

Earlier, the counsels for the appellants – Educational Promo-

tion Society for India (EPSI), Jaipuria Group of Institutions and

Association of Indian Management Schools (AIMS), contented

before the court that PGDM institutions should be given a free

hand in conducting admission process. Senior advocates

Rajeev Dhawan, Vinay Garg and KK Venugopal respectively, rep-

resented the appellants.

Hearing the writ peti-

tion filed by EPSI, AIMS

and Group of PGDM

institutions, the apex

court on March 17 this

year, had granted relief

to the PGDM institu-

tions of the country

against the notification

issued by the AICTE.

The order seems to be a big relief for the B-schools of the

country as they can continue to use any of the nationally

recognised entrance tests like CAT and MAT for their

admissions this year. There were nearly 80,000 complaints

against B-schools on overcharging and a little less than that

on denial of admissions/backdoor admissions with

capitation fees, according to AICTE.

SC Extends Stay on AICTE Notification

technical education

update

voices“On average, people with more education and higher attainment

make more than people with less education”—Anthony

CArnevAle, Director of Georgetown University Centre on education and the Workforce, USA

“Principals must understand that value addition in

education is the only means of a country achieving progress...

Students should not be taught, but be allowed to learn”— Dr BM heGDe retired vice chancellor, Manipal Academy of higher education (MAhe), India

“I think, as a nation, we hardly celebrate the achievements that one

can attain if one has a college education. We are a

nation that happily celebrates athletes and entertainers — and I think that’s great… But we do not have heroes that come out of a different kind of life”— SUSAn hoCkfIelD,President, Massachusetts Institute of technology, USA


reVision: Easing of norms in medical colleges has resulted in addition of approxi-mately 4,500 seats in MBBS courses, while nearly 6,400 seats have been added at the postgraduate level, Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said.

The minister said the recent revision of guidelines by the Medical Council of India “has increased the total of 4,542 MBBS seats in 21 new medi-cal colleges and 33 existing medical colleges during the academic year 2011-12”.

One of the steps taken to increase the number of

scholarship: The government has approved a 1,200-crore scholarship scheme for students in Jammu and Kashmir to pursue higher studies outside the state.

The plan was approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs that met here with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in chair. “ 88 crore will be incurred in the current financial year,” an official spokesperson said.

According to the plan, 5,000 fresh scholarships would be provided every year over the next five years. “Of these 4,500 scholarships will be for general degree courses, 250 for engi-neering and 250 for medical studies,” the spokesperson said. Every scholar will get up to 30,000 per year for tuition fees for general degree courses, up to 1.25 lakh for engineering courses and up to 3 lakh for medical studies.

In addition to these, hostel fees and incidentals will also be given for all categories of courses up to a ceiling of 1 lakh per annum. Students who pass Class XII or equivalent exam from Jammu and Kashmir Board and pursue general degree courses out-side the state, are eligible. “The income ceiling will be 4.5 lakh per year,” said the spokesperson.

4,500 Extra Seats in MBBS 2011-12: AzadThe revision of guidelines by the MCI has helped increase MBBS seats in 21 new and 33 existing medical colleges

The government to provide 5,000 scholarships every year over the next five years to study outside the state

seats for medical courses was reducing the teacher-student ratio from 1:1 to 1:2.

“These initiatives have resulted in an increase of approximately 6,400 additional PG seats in various disciplines

in medical colleges during the last two academic years, 2010-11 and 2011-12,” Azad said.

He added that 4,000 more PG seats are likely to be added as government has schemes for starting new PG disciplines and increasing PG seats by cen-tral funding.

4,000more PG seats are

likely to be added

`1,200 cr Scholarship Plan for J&K Students

Viewpoint Rahul Choudaha


Academic Leadership Beyond Bottom Line

In the June 2011 issue of EDU Tech, Editor Pramath Raj Sinha in his editorial, ‘Can Non Academics Lead’, observed: “...the leadership of academic institutions is no different from that of other enterprises.” While it is true today in the context of Indian institutions, it will not be so in the future. Majority of Indian institutions today are not focussed on research and have failed to provide quality teaching. However, as institutions mature, professionalise and seek global recognition, academic leadership will be characterised by competencies and credibility which will be very different from other enterprises.

I believe that the nature of academic leadership in the higher education setting is different from business leadership in at least three interrelated ways. First is the role of institutional mission which defines its purpose and

shapes the leadership style. The second is the success of an educational institution, which unlike a business enterprise, cannot be measured by the bottom line alone. And, the third is the role of governance, which is a shared responsibility and entails domain expertise for leading an educational institution.

Different LeaningsBolman and Gallosac in their recent book, Reframing Academic Leadership, note that higher education is different from business organisa-tions for several reasons including “...educational mission — a complex and variable mix of teach-ing, research, service, and outreach. Higher edu-cation’s mission requires that many of its key employees be teachers and scholars whose contri-butions depend on their unique expertise, dedica-tion, and capacity for professional judgment.”

To paraphrase, the core mission of a compre-hensive institution of higher education relates to teaching, research and community. Unfortunate-ly, in India there are only a handful of institutions which have a clearly defined mission. Most of the institutions here are places for teaching with no focus on research or community service. In the

Promoter-leaders may be the new norm in academia today, but with increased focus on research and global recognition, academic leaders will soon take centre stage. The success of an institution cannot be

measured by its bottom line alone; and the head of an institution is characterised by competencies and credibility that are very different from those possessed by the leaders of other enterprises.

Rahul Choudaha Viewpoint


“In India, majority of private sector institutions are not professional and are headed by promoters...the faculty has almost no say”

private sector, majority of the institutions are driv-en by a singular focus on profits or surpluses, which means that they have corporate style lead-ership with focus on the bottom line. Such an approach may work well for this segment of prof-it-oriented schools, but will fail miserably for institutions that seek excellence and quality.

Clash of principlesOne challenge that an institution with a mission statement seeking excellence faces is the clash between its academic and business motives. The emphasis for such an institution is on quality, research and global recognition, and this shifts the measures of success from profits made for promoters, to more nebulous ones like peer rec-ognition, rankings, and prestige. The success of such a hall of learning is then not measured by the number of students enrolled, but rather by how it is perceived by the stakeholders. It is the head of the school who builds its credibility.

Amanda Goodall in her book, Socrates in the Boardroom: Why Research Universities Should Be Led by Top Scholars, argues that scholars are in the best position to lead a research university because of their expertise and credibility, which signal con-fidence among the stakeholders about the values and mission of the institution. She notes, “...in settings where expert knowledge is the key factor that characterises an organisation’s core business, it is likely that expert knowledge is the key in the selection of its leader.”

The chances of an academic leader earning the trust and confidence of faculty members, are much higher when the person has grown within the educational system and is perceived as an expert by them. This trust becomes even more important in the shared governance model where faculty is intensively engaged with institutional vision and strategy. Bolman and Gallosac have noted that in such an institutional environment the faculty attains “...levels of individual autono-my and collective power beyond most employees in other sectors.”

Ajit Rangnekar, Dean, Indian School of Busi-ness, in an EDU interview claims, “[t]here is a lot more collaboration happening in the academic world and it is necessary to spend more time in building consensus with the faculty.” In 2006, President of Harvard University, Larry Summers, was forced to resign after a stormy battle with the faculty to establish himself as a change agent. Warren Bennis in his analysis of the event noted that Summers never quite got “...that leaders —especially those who are change agents — can

only succeed when they have a reservoir of good-will that allows them to convince followers that their fates are correlated.”

india needs Academic LeadersIn India, majority of private sector institutions are not professional and are headed by promoters as leaders. This means that the faculty has almost no say in the governance of these schools. In public institutions, the challenge is at the other extreme as the faculty lacks business acumen and per-ceives administration as clerical work. The need is to strike a fine balance between academic perspi-cacity and business efficiency.

According to a World Bank report, while US had attained a gross enrolment ratio of 56 per cent 30 years ago, India is still struggling to raise it from 13 per cent. For various reasons which have been discussed in EDU from time to time, at this nascent stage of education system, talented aca-demic leadership is in short supply and profes-sional practices are underdeveloped. Thus, bor-rowing talent from the corporate world is sometimes a necessity and there are instances where institutions have excelled with leaders from outside the academia.

Yet, for instituting and nourishing schools of excellence, there is an immediate need for a cadre of leaders who understand the unique character-istics of academia and its best practices. The future of higher education rests with leaders who make good choices, adapt global best practices and instill values of excellence and success which look beyond the bottom line.

Subscribe to the daily electronic newsletter from EDU at http://edu-leaders.com/content/newsletters

Rahul ChoudahaA higher education specialist based out of New York, Dr Choudaha blogs on www.DrEducation.com. He specialises in strategic management of higher education, institution building, collaborations and market development. He holds a PhD in Higher Education from the University of Denver, an MBA from NITIE, Mumbai and a BE from Jabalpur University. He can be reached at [email protected]

Viewpoint Rishikesha T Krishnan


Wanted Sutradhars of Social Change

Indian society is in a period of transition. The media, especially television, offers the possibility of instant fame through reality and talent shows. Small-town India has arrived on the national scene, whether it is on the cricket field or in show business. Middle-class India is learning to deal with affluence rather than scarcity. While traditional mores are not being thrown out, there is a more pragmatic attitude towards conventional rituals and practices.

Who studies and interprets these social phenomena and draws their impli-cations for us? Consumer marketers and brand builders like Santosh Desai of Future Brands and Dheeraj Sinha of Bates 141, (author of recently released book, Consumer India) and journalists such as Anand Giridharadas (who brought us another outstanding book, India Calling) are at the forefront of describing and explaining social change in India.

For decades, students in India understood social change from the pioneering work of people such as sociologist MN Srinivas. His theory of Sanskritisation, the tendency of other castes in India to imitate and aspire to brahminical practices, was a seminal work on Indian society. But today, it is marketing professionals like Dheeraj Sinha who are observing and

commenting on a tilt towards the Kshatriya-like values of competition and success.

time to Revive Social Sciences We know, of course, that the social sciences have been neglected in recent years, and that our best students have gone into disciplines that promise better prospects for advancement and income generation. We also know that there has been an under-emphasis on research in the Indian higher education system. But, today, as we rebuild Indi-an higher education, how can we improve the probability that more MN Srinivas-like work comes out of it?

Learnings from US experienceWhile sources as diverse as Minister of Rural Development, Jairam Ramesh, to MHRD Secre-tary, Vibha Puri Das, raise the buzz around the importance of research to a crescendo, we might pause to see what history tells us about such a shift in emphasis.

The experience of the United States is instruc-tive. The focus of US universities on research was an early-20th century phenomenon. With com-petitive research grants and a rigorous tenure sys-tem that valued publication in peer-reviewed jour-nals over everything else, the US became the

India needs academic commentators to capture the major transitions taking place in its social fabric. However, social sciences have been relegated to the backseat with students hankering after more prestigious and paying disciplines. It is time we

redefined scholarship to broaden its scope and developed a posse of engaged scholars.

Viewpoint Rishikesha T Krishnan


“Social scientists must grapple with significant social problems...around society...scholarship means more than research”

locus of academic research in the 20th century. But as teaching quality declined and the contribu-tions of academe to the community became less apparent, not all stakeholders were happy.

Public recognition of this problem came through the pioneering work of E Boyer, the then president of the Carnegie Institute. In his influential 1990 work, Scholarship Reconsidered, Boyer argued for a more holistic notion of scholarship, one that embraced four functions: discovery – the advance-ment of knowledge through original research and theorising; integration – making connections across disciplines and paradigms; application –applying knowledge to consequential problems through consulting and service; and teaching – transmitting, transforming and extending knowl-edge to students. Boyer went on to recommend that faculty performance appraisal should include measurement of all these dimensions.

With only a handful of universities embracing Boyer’s philosophy, the problem has become more acute. Today, sustainability of a system where stu-dents pay ever-increasing fees to support research-driven faculty is being called into question and paradigm-shifting research is rare, particularly in the social sciences and management.

towards the engaged ScholarAt this critical juncture, wouldn’t it be a good idea for our academic institutions to avoid becoming mere research factories? After all, the likely out-come of this is what Blake Ashforth calls ‘vanilla pudding’ – endless variations of tired themes.

For this, it’s important that we encourage scholarship rather than research. As Shelley Brickson of the University of Illinois argued in a recent article, an ideal scholar is measured by quality not quantity. You can’t have ideal scholarship without social impact. Ideal scholars come up with new ideas rather than just rely on empiricism. They are likely to be more passionate about their teaching because they believe in and relate to the research they are doing, and can see where it is leading.

Some scholars have shown the way. Professor Gretchen Spreitzer, at the University of Michi-gan’s Ross School, is one of the founders of the school of Positive Organisational Scholarship (POS). POS focuses on the dynamics in organisa-tions that develop human strength and cultivate extraordinary individuals. Closer home, profes-sors Udai Pareek and TV Rao, founders of the Human Resource Development (HRD) move-ment in India, conducted empirical research, published books, designed instruments and train-

ing methods, and diffused them across the whole spectrum of industry, leading to the founding of such institutions as the National HRD network and the Academy of HRD.

Prof Andrew Van de Ven of University of Min-nesota has given shape to this broader concept through his idea of ‘engaged scholarship’. Argu-ing that social scientists must grapple with sig-nificant social problems and challenges around society, he emphasises that scholarship means more than research, and that, engagement is the means for scholarship to flourish. Very much in the spirit of contemporary ideas like co-creation, engaged scholarship envisages a relationship between researchers and practitioners in a learn-ing community. He suggests that research proj-ects be designed ‘participatively’ integrating the advice and perspectives of users, clients, sponsors and practitioners. Such engaged scholarship would result in knowledge that is “more penetrat-ing and insightful than when scholars or practitio-ners work on the problems alone.” Quoting Boyer, he underlines the importance of the scholar step-ping back from investigations to build bridges between theory and practice, and communicate knowledge more effectively.

We know that what gets measured and incentiv-ised tends to get done. As we introduce new sys-tems of measurement in Indian higher education, we must be careful that we don’t spark a new race to the bottom – to an end where we are left with meaningless empirical studies that help no one except the authors themselves. We must promote a broader, holistic notion of engaged scholarship. Only then will the academia, rather than practitio-ners, be the sutradhars of our times.


Rishikesha T kRishnanDr Krishnan is a professor of corporate strategy at IIM Bangalore. He has an MSc in physics from IIT Kanpur, MS in Engineering-Economic Systems from Standford University, and a PhD from IIM Ahmedabad. He can be reached at [email protected]


expertiser e f o r m s & i n f r a s t r u c t u r e

By vijay shukla & Pankaj [email protected]

Vijay Shukla (above) is a Managing Partner at Eduvisors, a leading research and consulting firm focussed on the education sector. Eduvisors advises clients in implementing varsity projects and assists foreign universities and education businesses enter India. Pankaj Agarwal is a part of Eduvisors.

education reforms on Anvil

The Prohibition of Unfair Practices in Technical Educational Institutions, Medical Educational Institutions and Universities Bill, 2010, is a welcome step. However, it is more like a f ramework around which a more

comprehensive and complete policy to govern higher education needs to be built.

The surge of private players in the higher education sector, especially in the professional education streams such as technical and medical, is augmenting the supply side. Certainly a thing to rejoice, as providing quality professional education seems out of reach of the government. Unfortunately, it has also resulted in wide ranging unfair practices that the education providers resort to in their race for RoI (return on investment). From false advertising to opaque fee structure to misrepresentation of key information, the education entrepre-neurs are resorting to every trick in the book to maximise profits. These mal-practices mislead students into making wrong choices. Such education practi-tioners are also eroding the credibility of a sector as critical as education.

While the current policy in higher education promotes autonomy of institutions; institution promoters are adopting unfair practices by misusing it. This necessitates a tighter regulation regime to eliminate such practices. In such a scenario, The Prohibition of Unfair Practices in Technical Educational Institutions, Medical Educational Institutions and Universities Bill, 2010, which seeks to address these concerns, is a welcome

step. The Bill aims to balance autonomy and protect the interests of students.

Once the Bill is passed in Parliament, it is expected to regulate the higher education sector and address the key challenges faced by students and other stakeholders. The Bill intends to force institutions to bring transparency in the admis-sion process: prohibit them from providing admissions by charging over and above the sched-uled fee (e.g. capitation fee) in any form; and force them to deliver only credible and true information to students. It also aims to curb the widespread practice by institutions to withhold students’ degrees, certificates or documents in order to retain the money due to the student, or to compel them to continue in the same institute.

Vijay Shukla & Pankaj Agarwal exPertise


Checks & BalancesThe major unfair practices identified by the Bill, its provisions and suggest-ed solutions are:

• Providing admission by taking money, over and above the scheduled fee (e.g. capitation fee) or taking any favour in kind: The Bill prohibits capi-tation fee in any form. It considers the individual offering or paying any undue fee equally liable for punish-ment. It also mandates educational institutions to provide receipts against any money taken from students. The provision is aimed at bringing trans-parency in fee related transactions.

• Making false claims through mis-leading or false advertising: The Bill seeks to prohibit institutions from pub-lishing misleading advertisements about their recognitions/credentials, infra-structure, academics and other facilities.

• Not being transparent in commu-nicating the facts about the institute and the fee structure: The Bill mandates publica-tion and release of prospectus at least 60 days prior to the commencement of admissions. The prospectus should contain explicit details of all fee components (including the proportion of the fee to be returned in case the student leaves the course midway) and other such critical and rele-vant information likely to influence students’ decision-making. Also, the price of the prospectus must be reasonable covering printing costs, and no profit must be made out of its sale.

• Opaque, biased and arbitrary admission process: The Bill seeks to streamline the admission process protocol by making it compulsory for institutions to include details about admission tests in their prospectus. In case the institution does not have admission tests, it needs to explicitly mention the relevant admission criteria which must be fair, impartial and unbiased. Institutions are allowed to charge only a reasonable fee for admission tests that compensates the cost of conducting tests.

• Using undue pressure tactics like withholding documents such as degree or diploma: According to the Bill, if a student withdraws from the course mid-way, the institute can’t refuse to return the student’s original certificates or diploma or any other impor-tant documents to put undue and unfair pressure on him/her to continue at the institute. The institute also needs to refund to the student, a proportion of the fees, as mentioned in the prospectus.

road to reformThe Bill will treat

such malpractices as criminal or civil

offences

The Bill will treat such malpractices as criminal or civil offences depending upon the nature of the crime. The monetary penalty of up to Rs 50 lakh, or imprisonment up to three years, or both is pro-posed for the institution which contravenes the provisions, especially on the capitation fee and advertisement related clauses. Any institution refusing to return students’ documents or the pre- mentioned fee proportion, should the student drop out midway, will be liable to a penalty which may extend up to Rs 1 lakh.

implementation related ChallengesThe Bill is certainly a step in the right direction. However, certain loopholes and subjective provi-sions in the Bill can make its implementation pro-cess challenging.

These necessitate a well-structured framework to address demand side issues in education that contribute to unfair practices. The Bill’s intent can be grossly compromised if students and parents are unaware of their rights, and if there is no quick and accessible grievance addressing mechanism in place to address their problems. For example, Section 18 of the Bill proposes that if an institute contravenes any of the provisions, then the students or parents cannot directly move the court of law. They are required to approach through the authorised person, and only after the concerned person is convinced about the

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exPertise Vijay Shukla & Pankaj Agarwal

malpractice, can further proceedings begin. Such provisions can be potential loopholes in the whole process and undermine the impact of the Act. Also, the Bill does not propose to cover educational institutions established and administered by minorities. It would have been better to just exempt them from admissions process, rather than exempting them from the purview of the Bill altogether.

Though the clause mandating ‘reasonable fee’ for admission test and ‘reasonable price’ for the prospectus seems aimed at preventing institutions from making capital gains out of such transactions, it’s not practical. The costs of admission test and prospectus are determined respectively by the number of students applying for the admission test and the number of copies of prospectus sold. It is practically impossible to arrive at projections, especially if historical data is unavailable. While this clause can certainly check the errant institutions that charge prohibitively high amounts, it will be tough on the recently started schools that cannot have a buffer in their financial planning.

need for a Collaborative approachThe Bill is awaiting Parliament approval for over a year now and is most likely to be passed during this year. It is definitely a good starting point for the government to develop a foolproof higher education reform policy. Keeping it at the central node, a more comprehensive and sound eco-system can be developed around the Bill by constructive collaboration with institutions and experts. Independent bodies like Advertising Standards Council of India can be roped in to f rame ethica l s tandards guidel ine for advertisements in the education sector; suitable audit system to validate institutions’ cash flows; and appropriate legal system to apprehend and prosecute defaulters. Relevant adaptations can be made to achieve the key objectives of the Bill.

road to reformThe Bill does not propose to cover

educational institutions

established and administered by

minorities



PursuitThe

ofPrestigeWhat it takes to reach the top...EDU finds out

Is prestige the Holy Grail for institutions today? Are they all looking for respect and administration of society at large? What exactly are the scales on which an institition’s prestige rests? Is the leader important in this quest or is it the teacher? Do students make their

institute or is it the infrastructure? These and many more parameters that judge a school were weighed by an overwhelming 530 respondents in the EDU Pursuit of Prestige Survey. The results were surprising. One thing that shone through in the survey was the involvement of the higher education community in their field. They displayed an amazing drive to look for solutions and connect with the purpose of working towards a better tomorrow. It was apparent that to them the ultimate goal of an institution is to produce the best students and give back to society leaders of tomorrow. An institute which excels in this is prestigious: it strives for excellence, while remaining rooted to the spiritual values of education.

I N S I D E23 | Faculty24 | academic Programmes25 | students26 | research27 | institutional administration28 | technology usage29 | Building & inFrastructure30 | collaBorations31 | stakeholder ParticiPation

k ramnarayan, VC, Manipal University: “An institution that nurtures holistic development of

the individual is the most prestigious varsity in the world”

19September 2011 EduTEch 19September 2011 EduTEch

401 respondents

said that course

updates and upgrades are

crucial for prestige

Publish or Perish:

Research is important

People First:Faculty builds an institution

439 respondents

said that able leadership for

vision and planning is very

important

On the index of importance,

faculty scored the highest at

99 and academic

programmes scored 94

k ramnarayan, VC, Manipal University: “An institution that nurtures holistic development of

the individual is the most prestigious varsity in the world”

dr s sivasubramanian, VC, Noorul Islam University: “Vision, honesty, integrity and

effectiveness of the VC, contribute to the prestige of an institution”

survey covEr STory


covEr STory survey

What is prestige in the eyes of the higher education institu-tions in India? What are the

parameters on which a university or col-lege is adjudged as prestigious? What are the quality benchmarks that the institu-tions themselves perceive as bringing them prestige? Is it quality faculty, a visionary leader, world-class infrastruc-ture or brilliant students that make an institution prestigious? When we set out on our survey, some of you had raised the query as to why we are calling it, In Pursuit of Prestige and not excellence. The answer is: simply because while pur-suing excellence it is really prestige that is our aim; we ultimately want to be among the best.

The Edu Survey threw up some inter-esting and enlightening results. On the index of importance of factors that influ-ence the prestige of an institution; facul-ty scored the highest at 99. Academic programmes 94, students 93, and research scored 93.

But is it possible to attract quality fac-ulty to your institution, without a leader who can command their respect and inspire them to give their best? Try intro-ducing new programmes without a lead-

a university or a college is only as good as its reputation. little wonder that educational institutions the world over are in pursuit of prestige: widespread respect and admiration for their achievements and quality

anything without an inspirational leader at the helm, who believes that the ulti-mate goal of higher education is to be a contributor to society, and help students traverse the universe of knowledge, while learning the ability to adapt to

“Distinguished alumni”

—Srinivasan SundarrajanDirector, NIT Trichy

“Government funding, vision, honesty, integrity and effectiveness of the VC; belongingness to the institution felt by every stakeholder”

—Dr S Sivasubramanian(Former VC of Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu), VC, Noorul

Islam University

“Industry interaction”

—C Gopalkrishnan Director, Institute of Management,

Nirma University

other factors contributing to the prestige of an institution:

—K Ramnarayan VC, Manipal University

“Academicians in key administrative

positions like that of vice chancellor”

Edu Survey | PrESTIgE

er who backs them. Try to get your alum-ni involved and contribute endowments, with a head in whom they do not believe. Try to get researchers to do great work without a leader who understands them and supports their cause. Just try doing

A Leader’s vision of Success


survey covEr STory

sachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, wrote an article titled ‘The New Education’ in a leading journal of opin-ion, The Atlantic Monthly. The article presented an idea that could reform the American higher education system. The businessmen of Boston, who controlled the college corporation, had finally found the change that they were looking for: Prof Charles William Eliot. And, Eliot became the youngest president of America’s oldest university — Harvard. What followed in the next 40 years was the phenomenal transformation of Havard into the most prestigious institu-tion in the world.

Though opinions may differ on the most prestigious institution in the world, however it is indisputable that

Factors that Influence the Prestige of an Institution

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Faculty

99

AcademicProgrammes

94Institutional

Administration

89Technology

Usage

87

Building & Infrastructure

86Financing & Funding

88

Collaborations

83

Stakeholder Participation

77

Students

93

Research

93

with the classical curricula or to go for more vocational offerings. Colleges were controlled by clergymen, who were in favour of the classical mode of study. But the rising class of businessmen in an increasingly industrialised America, were no longer interested in sending their sons to such colleges and felt that higher education should be made more vocational. In the middle of this conun-drum was a college in Boston: rudder-less and slowly fading away as three suc-cessive presidents in 10 years had failed to revive it. Its alumni, many of whom were now influential businessmen, wanted change: but no one knew what change they were seeking.

It was then that a 35-year-old professor of Chemistry at the newly founded Mas-

change and be of use to humanity. It would be quite an impossible task.

The head of institution not only charts his own course by the simple choices she/he makes but also shapes the future of thousands of individuals. It is ulti-mately, the administrator of the institu-tion who makes or breaks its reputation. It is the vision of the person at the top that sets the ship on its course, or leaves it adrift, a la Charles Eliot. Eliot made Harvard University what it is today: the most prestigious institution of higher learning in the world.

The Boston ExperimentIn the 1860s, American higher educa-tion was in a crisis, with institutions undecided about whether to continue in

Fog

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covEr STory survey

“MIT for its application oriented efforts”—Srinivasan Sundarrajan, Director, NIT Trichy

“The Ivy League (Harvard, etc) in the US, Oxford and Cambridge in UK, IIMs (especially IIM-A) and IITs in India”—Imon Ghosh,Director, Academy of Human Resources Development

Which Institution or University is the Most Prestigious in the World? Why?

Harvard is among the top global univer-sities. A majority of the respondents in the EDU survey also billed Harvard as the most prestigious institution, with MIT coming a close second.

What has made Harvard the institu-tion that it is today? Most academics have wondered about its success mantra at least once in their careers. Some say that Harvard owes its prestige to its age: it is one of the oldest universities in the world. But by this analysis, University of Bologna, University of Padua and Uni-versity of Salamanca should also feature on the list of the most prestigious uni-versities. There are others who feel that Harvard selects the most brilliant talents and hence attracts the most brilliant fac-ulty and students. Perhaps yes. But then what brought them to Harvard? How did it all start? The answer lies in the 40 years of Eliot’s administration.

What happened then? For starters he practiced what he preached. He set out implementing all the reforms that he had talked about in his article. Eliot hired renowned scholars from America and abroad, reorganised the existing faculty, introduced standardised entrance exams attracting students from around the world, and rebuilt laboratories and class-rooms. He reformed the curriculum pragmatically to include electives, and specialised studies. But, he never moved away from the ultimate spiritual goal of education and espoused the belief that a university should ultimately be able to serve society. The research at the univer-sity should be aligned to the progress of society. He also believed that a college education should help students make intelligent choices, rather than provide merely technical and vocational training.

So were it the reforms that trans-formed Harvard from a fading institu-tion in Boston to the most prestigious in the world? Definitely, but it were Eliot’s vision and leadership that wrought these transformations. Otherwise, Harvard would have remained just another unre-markable parochial institution.

Undoubtedly, leadership and vision of the head of institution play a crucial role in the pursuit of prestige.

“Oxford. It fulfils column one rating in almost all the criteria” —Darlando Khathing, VC, Central University of Jharkhand

“Harvard for its top class faculty, great alumni achievements, research output, and good multiple academic disciplines”—Dheeraj Sanghi, Former Director, LNMIIT

“Cannot be ranked like that”—Amita Chatterjee, VC, Presidency University

“Harvard University, USA. Because of its seminal contributions in basic and fundamental research in all domains of knowledge”—Rajasekharan Pillai, VC, IGNOU

“Harvard University. It has illustrious alumni and it has been innovative in its programmes and outreach”—Ajit Rangnekar, Dean, ISB


survey covEr STory

What would you rather have: a good team with a bad idea, or a good idea with a bad team?

A good team always figures out a bad idea, but there is not much you can do with a bad team. That is why choosing the right faculty is the most important factor in your drive for excellence. The faculty members of an institution are its ambassadors. The teachers directly inter-act with the students and create an impression about the institution and the values and mores for which it stands.

Little wonder, that the majority (84%) of the respondents said qualification and experience of the faculty was very impor-tant and rated it the highest on the importance scale.

Unfortunately, there is a famine of good teachers. The Human Resource

96 92 91 88 84 83 81

Faculty Related Factors that Influence Prestige

“A wide horizon, and an

understanding that they are the role

models,even outside classroom

interaction”—Shashi Gulhati former CEO, EdCil

Factoring in FacultyEdu Survey | FAcULTy

Development Ministry’s task force has declared that there is a shortage of three lakh teachers in higher education. Institution administrators are often heard complaining that it is difficult to get reasonably experienced faculty from among the available faculty pool. Apparently, the only way to bridge this

67%of the respondents said

faculty development and training is a very important factor in contributing to the

prestige of an institution

Faculty Qualifications & Experience | Number of Permanent Faculty | Faculty Development & Training Current Research & Publications by Faculty | Student Feedback on Faculty | Quality of Visiting or

Adjunct Faculty | International Teaching & Research Experience | Faculty Recognition by Corporate Sector Faculty Participation as External Experts | Length of Faculty Tenure

shortfall of good teachers is for institutions to concentrate on faculty development and training.

The role of a teacher as a communica-tor came up strongly in the survey. The respondents were almost unanimous in their views that the relationship which a teacher builds with his/her students is critical. To quote a respondent: “Not all worldly qualifications make a teacher a contributor. It is an art that originates in

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the heart of the per-son: to interact and act as a mentor.” A genuine interest in the progress of stu-dents is the prerequi-site to your becoming a teacher who is a class apart from the rest of the herd.


covEr STory survey

401respondents said that

course updates and upgrades are very

important for prestige

Academics is the BackboneEdu Survey | AcADEMIcS

Academic Factors that Influence Prestige

Course Updates & Upgrades

Pedagogy & Teaching

Methodology

Innovation & New Courses

Academic Audits

Accreditation

96

94

93

89

86

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The methods employed to deliver aca-demic programmes are also relevant. Teaching must be made participatory. The administration and the faculty must constantly update themselves to keep abreast of what is happening around the world. It is important to be socially con-scious in order to design relevant cours-es. The faculty should also be given cer-tain freedom to include what they consider is important in a course.

Some suggestions that our readers have given include regular departmental review meetings on academic pro-grammes, lectures from industry experts, interdisciplinary programmes and regular course updates in consulta-tion with the industry. However, while interacting with the industry, one has to learn not to get so focussed on vocational skills that it takes away from the basic

Academic programmes received the second highest vote in the survey. It is certainly the back-

bone of any institution. From the Har-vard experience, it is easy to see that if your courses are not relevant to present day and age, then your institution can easily fade away. Innovative courses, as required by the industry, liberal electives, regular academic audits, feedback, from both students and the industry, have to be an integral part of the academic struc-ture of an institution.

principles of an educational institution — that of betterment of human values and broadening of students’ perspective to equip them with skills that help them adapt to change.

“Feedback from the industry”

—C Gopalkrishnan Institute of Management, Nirma


survey covEr STory

“The attitude and ethical consciousness

of the students in being able to

contribute to society as mature and balanced individuals is also a

key factor”—Bala V Balachandran,

Founder & Dean, Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai

Student Related Factors that Influence Prestige

Achievements of Alumni

Student Entry through Competitive Exams

Student Achievements in Extra-curricular

Activities

Student-led Initiatives

92

90

8584

At the end of the day, an institution is finally gauged by the performance of its students,

both while studying at the institution and after they leave it. Students are the ultimate brand ambassadors of their schools. It is important for institutions to attract the right students, and the selection process, is hence, critical. However, it has been found that education leaders are not as concerned about the kind of students taken in through competitive exams, as they are about the achievements of their alumni.

A good sign, as an institution must be committed to equipping its students with the life skills required to adapt to a constantly changing world. A school’s reputation is linked to its alumni reputation. The top institutions of the world have some of the most high-profile achievers on its alumni rolls of honour. Harvard is the alma mater of 62 living

An Institution is the Students it Produces

Edu Survey | STUDENTS

billionaires. According to the Guardian: “a survey of living MIT alumni found that they have formed 25,800 companies, employing more than three million people including about a quarter of the workforce of Silicon Valley.”

However, most institutions in India do not have an active alumni relationship pro-gramme. There is a lot that an institution can achieve through interactions with its former students.

Student-led initiatives scored the lowest on the

index of importance with a score of

84To

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covEr STory survey

91 8492 88 80

Publish or perish is clearly the dik-tat that the educationist commu-nity believes in: a majority of

them viewed that publications help in building esteem. However, publishing for the sake of it, is not the right way to go about things. Researchers need to be inspired to work, and, under the right leadership this is not an impossiblity.

Our respondents too, believe in research that is relevant and is in a new field. Many of them clearly stated that research should be socially relevant. Some also pointed out that research collaboration within the institution, among different departments and at the intersection of various disciplines, can make a huge difference. Involving students in research related activities

Research Related Factors that Influence Prestige

Publications in Peer-reviewed Journals Research in New Fields & Topics Industry-collaborated Research & Projects Receipt of Prestigious Grants & Funding Collaborative Inter-Institution Research

Edu Survey | rESEArch

an institution’s administration plays the most important role : providing encouragement and support.

In our country, research and teaching have been seen as two separate compo-nents of higher education, with research institutions becoming oases of excel-lence. However, if we look to the most prestigious institutions in the world, we find teaching and research co-existing as complementary and cohesive wings.

“Creating the right ambience for research,

both in terms of facilities and teaching workload; recognising research contribution by suitable means and emphasising quality

work in emerging and multidisciplinary

areas, etc”—Prof Dr S Sivasubramanian,

(former VC of Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu)

The research rumble

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Publications in peer reviewed journals got a

score of

92on the importance index

was also felt strongly. Patenting of innovations, too, was considered important by many respondents. Funding for research is often a problem. However, some of the respondents said, “Funding always comes if the project is good.” For a research temperament to flourish and good research to take place,


survey covEr STory

Able leadership for vision and planning had the highest num-ber of people rooting for it, with

439 respondents saying that it is very important. It is evident that an inspira-tional and effective leader can turn-around any institution. Every other pro-cess in administration becomes smooth, if you have a visionary leader and a capa-ble administrator at the helm of affairs. From our interactions with some of the visionaries in higher education we have learnt that there are five ways to reach the position of a great leader:

1. Win the trust and confidence of everyone. Do not trade off someone’s

Institutional Administration Factors that Influence Prestige`

Follow the LeaderEdu Survey | LEADErShIP

Able institutional leadership for vision and planning scored

98 on the index of

importance

professional conduct and accountability in all aspects of university life

4. Identify the right kind of people and be committed to their development. Focus on people because at the end of the day they make the university

5. Pursue excellenceOf course, there are voices of dissent

who claim that true leaders are born and cannot be made. However, if an institution leader has even one of the qualities listed here, the rest can be cultivated. In the final analysis, it is an academic head’s love of teaching and the world of students that makes him/her an an inspirational figure in the community.

trust for anything. Build confidence that you can pull it off and lead by example in everything that you do

2. Create an environment of transparency 3.Strive for the highest standards of

Able Institutional Leadership Day-to-day Institutional Administration Student Internships & Placements Support for Research Effective Admissions Process Institute-Industry Interfaces Efficient Student Administration

9892919089

—MJ Xavier,Director, IIM Ranchi

“Student involvement in administration”

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covEr STory survey

A common grouse of many of our educational leaders is that tech-nology is overrated. But if you

look at the best institutions in the world, you will find that these are the places where new technologies are being born daily. The top-rated schools are technology savvy and recognise that the future hinges on it. In order to equip and inspire stu-dents to create something new, institu-tions need to be keyed in to technology — existing and emerging. An institution’s

Institutional website scored the highest on the

index of importance at

91quest for the Holy Grail will remain unachievable unless institutions prepare themselves technologically to achieve it.

But as one of our respondents said: “It is not just a question of creating these facilities, but the effective utilisation of the same by the teachers, students and research scholars and of course the administration.”

Institutions bring in the latest technolo-gies, but most often they remain unutilised or underutilised. Teachers and students must be encouraged to become familiar with technology, as it can be har-nessed to make work simpler and better. From administration to research, technol-ogy can aid an institution in many ways. It is up to the institution to break these barriers to technology.

Edu Survey | TEchNoLogy

Taming Technology “Use of

technology in curriculum

delivery”—S Gurpur

Director, Symbiosis Law School, Pune

Technology Related Factors that Influence Prestige

91 High-speed Connectivity to External World

90 Campus-wide High Speed Networks

86 Student Record Management Systems & Digital Libraries

85 Institutional HR Systems

82 Web-based Student Services

84 Campus-wide Wireless Networking

81 Institutional ERP Systems

79 Online Student Evaluation, Videoconferencing & Collaboration

75 Interactive Whiteboards

92 Institutional Website

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Infrastructure scored the lowest in the survey. However, we cannot under-mine the role that state-of-the-art

infrastructure plays in an institution’s prestige ranking. Classrooms, laborato-ries, libraries and sports facilities must be good. The best institutions boast of the best facilities. Harvard’s library is second largest in the US. No wonder, libraries and laboratories got the highest vote from our readers. Though recreation and sports facilities have been rated much lower; they are playing a big part in the best institutions. It is a well-known fact that an aesthetically designed campus can change the way people perceive an insti-

Institutional Infrastructure Factors that Influence Prestige

Library Well-equipped Labs Classrooms with Modern Teaching Aids On-campus Residential Facilities Size of Campus Layout of Campus Recreation & Sports Facilities Ownership of Campus

9695

9085

8482

76

112 respondents were neutral on the issue of ownership

of campuses

Not Just Brick & Mortar

Edu Survey | INFrASTrUcTUrE

tution. However, blindly aping the US or the European models is not the best answer. Campuses in India must evolve with their roots in Indian traditions and borrow from the vast knowledge of our ancestors for building green and energy-efficient campuses.

“Student activity centre,

meditation/yoga hall, auditorium

and amphitheatre, are others that are essential”

—MJ XavierDirector, IIM Ranchi

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covEr STory survey

The right kind of collaborations can help you get that edge for your institution, but it has to

work both ways to be effective. The truly prestigious institutions always have a mutually beneficial collaborative pro-gramme. In your quest to reach the top, it is a good place to start. Faculty and stu-dent exchange programmes enhance and broaden the horizons of both the teachers and students.

Working on joint research pro-

collaborate to Achieve“Whatever be the collaboration, it

must be effectively implemented. It

should not be only on paper for the

sake of advertisement”

Course Design & Materials Evaluation & Certification Faculty Exchange Programmes Student Exchange Programmes Transferable Credits Dual Degree/Twinning Programmes

Edu Survey | coLLABorATIoN

Dual/Twinning programmes scored

75 on the index of importance

tional Alliance of Research Universities do phenomenal work by sharing knowl-edge and working on projects that require large funds and collaborative work.

Collaborations, however don’t always work. Many times, it just remains on paper. It succeeds only when there is equal commitment on both sides to see it through.

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Inter-Institutional Collaboration Factors that Influence Prestige

—SivasubramanianVC, Noorul Islam University

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grammes can often be very rewarding. In fact, most high-end research projects are done collaboratively, where researchers with similar interests get together to work on it. Organisations like Interna-


survey covEr STory

Stakeholder factor scored the low-est in our survey. But contribu-tion of alumni in an institution’s

prestige cannot be ignored. Harvard would not have attained its current sta-tus if the alumni were not involved in its affairs. The kind of endowments that Harvard attracts is also because of the relationship it maintains with its for-mer students.

Our respondents gave the highest vote to the quality of companies coming to the campus for recruitment. It is true, that when industry recognises an institu-tion’s potential, you have truly arrived. However, it is also true that if you are not yet there and still struggling to make a name for yourself, then the alumni, who may be in positions of importance, can help with campus recruitments. They

“Rankings can become a bit of a game. There are too many factors

involved. It is important for the institution to do

its own periodical quality audit”

—Kavita Sharma,Director, India International

Centre, former principal, Hindu College, University of Delhi

Stakeholder Factors Influencing Prestige

Quality of Companies Conducting On-campus Recruitment Quality of Companies Offering Student Internships Reputation of Governing Board Members Advocacy & Support from Alumni Winning National & International Awards Financial Support from Alumni & Other Sources Rankings in Surveys

Stakeholders Make a Difference

Edu Survey | STAkEhoLDErS

Rankings scored the lowest at

71on the index of

importance

are the beacons of quality of a school. In the absence of a good alumni outreach programme, it may not be possible to tap into their areas of influence.

Some of our readers pointed out that the parent community can also help in spreading the word about an institution and it would be a good idea to get them on your side.

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dialogue Dr T Ramasami


Quality research will happen only when there is an urge to discover something. Fortunately, this hunger for innovation is embedded in a majority of the people in India

Dr T Ramasami dialogue


Dr T ramasami

EngagEmEnt: Secretary to the Government of India, DST

aCaDEmIC:• Master’s in Leather Technology, University of Madras, India • PhD in Chemistry from the University of Leeds, UK

awarDs:• Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Chemical Sciences, 1993 • Great Son of the Soil Award, All India

Conference of Intellectuals• National Civilian Honour (Padma Sri)• Acharya PC Ray Memorial Oration Award• Chemito Award for Excellence in Chemistry

and Life Sciences• Fellow, Indian National Science Academy

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edu: What is the role of department of Science and Technology (dST) in encouraging research and innovation?dr T Ramasami: Let me use the analogy of a nursery keeper to describe DST. A nursery keeper doesn’t know which seed will germinate, which germinated seed will become a sapling, which sapling will become a tree and which tree will bear the fruit. But a farmer cannot afford such ignorance. He must know the seeds, the land he tills, the best season to plant the seeds, among many other things. Institutions like Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) or Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) are like farmers. DST invests in hope, while CSIR & BARC invest in returns.

We are a bottoms-up organisation. We don’t drive down processes or direct the system, whereas the farmers do direct them.

Any final research is done by the people. At DST, we want to build national capacity without limiting ourselves to any specific area. The good thing about India is that there is no shortage of problems, and, we need people to solve them. Which problem is more important? It is a matter of choice that the people must make and not the government.

Our focus is not on innovation alone, but the capacity for innovation. By building capacity, you can harvest a large number of products and processes in the times to come. But, innovations are limited to a particular lifetime. You should see DST as a policy maker not an executive body.

Dr T Ramasami, Secretary to the Government of india, Department of Science and

Technology, has revolutionary ideas on research. he shared

with EDu his vision, mission and achievements

Beaten Path

Research off the

By SmiTa PoliTe



Our focus is on enabling a policy frame-work and giving hope to the people. In 2006, the remuneration of a research fel-low was a measly 8,000. Within two months, we raised it to 12,000 and added an HRA component to the salary struc-ture. In two years, it was hiked to 16,000, excluding HRA, which was paid addition-ally. We are working on revising it again and also on an annual increment scale. It is not about more money. Rather, it shows our concern for researchers. We raised their salary without anyone asking us. And since then, the number of PhDs as com-pared to 2003, has risen considerably.

2010-2020 has been declared as the decade of innovation. What are the schemes that the dST is working on to promote innovation?

Innovation, by definition is the first application of a concept. It need not be in science and technology alone. Traditional-ly, our country has focussed on under-standing nature and discovering natural phenomena. We have not focussed on plain knowledge. As such, our cultural sys-tem of learning is not centred on innova-tion. Rather, it is centred on wisdom, knowledge, understanding natural phe-nomena and multiple processes. In fact, astronomy has a strong presence in India.

Human Resource Development) field of work. But the researchers in the univer-sities are our concern. In a study that mapped the publication output of uni-versities in India from 1996 to 2006, we found that 35 institutions contributed about 47 per cent of publications from India. Of them, just 14 were universities. The data was an eye-opener. We then developed a new scheme called Promo-tion of University Research and Scien-tific Excellence (PURSE). Under this, we gave incentives to universities based on their performance in 2006. They were also given the freedom to invest funds in areas which they felt needed attention. When we reviewed these institutions after three years, there was a remarkable change in their performance. The analy-sis of citations and publications between 1998 and 2008 showed that the number of contributing universities had grown from 14 to 44. In 2010, 31 per cent of publications had come from universities.

Consolidation of University Research for Innovation and Excellence (CURIE) is another initiative which we set up to improve the R&D infrastructure in universities for women.

The National Innovation Foundation for promoting grassroots innovation, which was supported by a corpus fund from DST, has now become an autonomous

But in today’s world, when knowledge is money and money is being converted into knowledge, innovation is essential. We need to create an ecosystem where schools, universities and institutions like IITs, have a similar focus. There must also be demand from the industry for innovation. If there is no demand for innovation, there is little point in supplying it.

Science and technology departments define objectives. Schemes are just the means of reaching these goals. The focus should be on the objective itself and not on the schemes because the lat-ter changes with the context, situation, and the nature of an organisation.

Creating a project culture in this ecosystem is important, in order to steer it towards innovation. For example, Pursuit of Inspired Research is an initiative where we introduce the concept of innovation to 10-year-olds. Then we had an initiative called The Power of Ideas, where The Economic Times, DST and IIM Ahmedabad came together and invited people to send original ideas that could be developed into working models. In three months, we received 6,500 ideas. After due diligence, we found 250 ideas worth working on and funding.

The universities are not our main focus; that is MHRD’s (Ministry of



institution headed by Anil Gupta of IIM-A. Primarily, what we are doing is to try and promote affordability of innovation.

Because the rest of the world is focussed on the process of innovation, India has an opportunity to leverage the purpose of innovation. This is affordable to many and contributes to the development of the larger population.

Will you also be involved with the innovation universities?

Not as an institution. Institutional capacity and human capacity-building are interpenetrating roles and responsibili-ties. But they demand very different cul-tural practices. A university, by definition, has to focus on the scholarship of indi-viduals. It is not a place where you get a product or a process. It is a centre where you create an individual who then creates his own innovations and processes. It is a place for human capacity building and prepares a person for life. On the other hand, institutions, especially research institutions, focus on products and pro-cesses. Human beings are not products and innovation universities are not about the physical manifestation of patents. But, if you look at the department as a policy maker which wants to build inno-vation capacity, then yes, innovation uni-versities will also be supported by us.

People seem to be opting more for high paying jobs and sectors like iT, and pure sciences are being neglected. What are your views on this?

This is mainly due to people’s perceptions, even though evidence points elsewhere. But then, you may ask where do these perceptions come from? Just look at the cut-off marks in Delhi University for its science courses.

The number of students entering tertiary education sector is increasing. Earlier, about 35 lakh students used to seek admission to these courses. The figure has now risen to approximately 1.6 crore students. Social behaviour is dictated by many factors and not just policy. And, students opting for appl icat ion-oriented jobs where compensation packages are huge, is a natural process that we shouldn’t fight against. IT industry creates millions of jobs annually, while pure science research centres generate just 6000 vacancies. There is a huge difference. But perhaps, it is not fair to compare the two, because 6000 by itself is a good number.

In my opinion, the enthusiasm to study abstract subjects like astrophysics and astronomy is not decreasing. It may be lower when compared to other popular subjects, but still it is adequate to meet the requirements of the science sector.

When you talk about pure sciences, you must also understand the purpose of the subjects. Every person studying science doesn’t have to become a scientist . Science is required to understand even non-science processes, including banking. Who says IT, medicine or marketing exclude science? But then, people in marketing earn more money than people involved in product research. And that is why, there exists this perception that pure sciences are less popular.

Most of us see things through our individual telescope. If you look at the total ecosystem and say engineering and IT are also sciences, then it becomes different. People like me look at things in their totality. So, I am not worried.

We often compare ourselves to China or the uS. according to you how do indian universities compare to them in terms of research?

There is no point in comparing India with the US or China. All the countries of the world are not in the same phase of development. What you require for your country should suit your stage of progress. At this moment, our emphasis is on increasing enrolment. If you have to teach more people with fewer faculties, it is a big challenge. And, if you say just conduct research and forget teaching, that’s not good for the country.

Universities in India are grappling with many system-related challenges. They are dealing with complex problems which are different for state, central and private uni-versities. Governance is a very important part of the system and has an impact on all the activities of an organisation. Instead of trying to change the system, which is the MHRD’s job, we are supporting them to leverage resources that we can provide. And, our experience in the last five years has been good. There are more patents and c i t a t i o n s – e v i d e n c e o f o u r successful approach.

India’s growth rate in patents and publi-cations is 12 per cent per year. The highest growth rate in the world is that of China at 18 per cent and 12 per cent is at the second spot. The world average is 4 per cent. The IITs and our universities are growing at about 18 per cent. Nations should look at trends, not absolute quantum. The trends are positive, but we have a long way to go.

An individual is driven by aspirations and inspirations, but systems are driven by their own behaviour. A university, first of all, has to provide tertiary education. That is fundamental. However, if this component of the education system is not connected to excellence in research, it will lose in quality. So you cannot ignore research.

But what kind of research do I do? Research in development areas like agriculture or water, is different from product research that industry will absorb and make profits from. The kind of mix that a university chooses for its research work will depend on the development phase of a country.

Students opting for jobs where compensation packages are huge, is a natural process that we shouldn’t fight



you have been a scientist yourself, how do you think universities can conduct quality science research?

Quality research will happen only when there is an urge to discover some-thing. Fortunately, this hunger for inno-vation is embedded in a majority of the people in India.

You have a country north of Himalayas with which everyone is obsessed. But all that this country does and achieves is by processes that are driven from the top. Some of us here are also taking that route. India has a composite culture, so one model won’t work. In a research environment, the moment you drive things from the top, there’s a price to pay. The moment ‘how many patents and papers’ becomes our main concern, there will be a dilution of standards, lit-erature and quality. You cannot avoid it, because you’re forcing people to do things. It’s not natural. There is a bal-ance that you have to achieve. Mankind has always wanted revolutionary growth. So we had an industrial revolution, a green revolution, an agricultural revolu-tion and a white revolution. But, Nature takes the evolutionary path. In the revo-lutionary path, you use more materials, money and energy, but utilisation is low. Thus, the evolutionary path is optimal.

So the balance for a country hinges on maximisation of optimisation. Several of us talk about maximisation and some old guys like me talk about optimisation.

So, you do not believe in the ‘publish or perish’ culture?

I am not sure whether anyone who published a lot prospered from his/her publications. Our scientific discoveries are evidence of engaging passions of creative minds. The best scientists in the world have just had three or four wonderful ideas in life. Science should not be pursued only for the sake of publications. If you combine publication with a career and create a career reward system, then such professional pursuits will yield your country only in the short run. In the long run, you will have to pay a price that a country should not have to pay. But, reward systems have a

tendency to work against value systems. I am not sure which should be protected — values or rewards? As the secretary of DST, I would like India to be very competitive. I wouldn’t want Indian youth not to scale the heights of global competitiveness. When India ranked 15th in publications in 2003, I wasn’t happy. But we’ve moved up to the ninth position now, so I feel better, and want us to move further up. In my official capacity, I am pushing for it, but my personal philosophy is different.

How has the situation changed over the years? Can you say that india is doing well now?

When I came to India in 1976 after com-pleting my PhD from the UK, there were no facilities in this country. I went to the director and asked him to give me 50,000 to purchase a device for some research work. He gave me 30,000. I pooled the remaining 20,000 from my personal funds. A majority of us worked on our research with little or no facilities and infrastructure. That situation has changed to a large extent now. We have agreements with countries like Germany and Japan for procuring proper equipment.

If you ask me whether India is doing well, my answer is ‘yes’. But if you ask me if India has lived up to its potential, my answer is ‘no’. There is a big differ-

ence between where we are and where we could be, but that gap can be bridged if the trends are right. I am not sure if India will maximise its potential in my lifetime. I will die but my nation cannot. So for a country like India, it’s more important to see how sustainable its approach is, and not how rapid.

How much do we spend on research? is our return on investment good?

Our expenditure on research is a little less than one per cent of our GDP. But the GDP is increasing and will double in the next five years. That’s what the Prime Minister has promised. Of the total expense, 0.74 per cent is in the public sector and 0.26 per cent is in the private sector. In the world including China, the investment in public sector is one-third and in private sector it is two-third. In Japan, the ratio stands at 80 per cent in the private sector and 20 per cent in the public sector.

In India, private sector engagement is low because our ability to convert technology into high value products is also low. In terms of total amount of money spent on technology, China invests 21 times more than India. If you compare the number of scientists between countries, China has nine to every one scientist that India has, while the US has 30 against our one. So when you’re comparing India to the US, you must also take into account the input-output ratio of each country.

The ROI is OK but the investments are low. However, investments cannot increase without absorption capacity. There is a time lag between our d e v e l o p m e n t p h a s e a n d t h e i r development phase. China started economic liberalisation 10 years ahead of us. What was the life expectancy of an average Indian when the British left the country? Below 30 years. Today, it’s 65 years. That is a major development. These are the areas in which we have made investments, and they must get precedence over what we apply in science and technology. The political will to invest in R&D is not lacking. My budget has increased 2.4 times since I joined,

The kind of mix that a university chooses for its research work will depend on

the development phase of a country



and the preparedness to invest is also fair. But the returns are yet to come.

you were recently involved in the curriculum committee report of the iiTs. How do you think administrators can encourage research?

If you ask an IIT professor, who has fairly good research potential, to tell how much time he spends on teaching, education administration and research, the answer may shock you. You will find that a lot more time is spent on education administration and in conducting examinations like JEE. Every time we increase the batch size, the sheer number of answer-sheets to be corrected also increases.

This is a huge obstacle in the path of those who may be interested in research. On the other hand, we have noticed that many talented women leave research work halfway to take a break and start a family. Re-entry for

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such women, who are in the age group of 35-40 years, becomes difficult in pure research. For instance, I can’t go back to a research lab. I will be thrown out because I have been away for too long. But then, these women have a solid education base which can help in administration work, like correcting papers and conducting exams. So we can create a cadre of such women to work in administration. But we have to treat them with dignity. They should not be treated as mere assistants, but as academic facu l t y who work in administration. If you do that, you can then unshackle the core faculty and let them flourish in the creative space of research. These s teps can a lso help universities.

Also, when talking about research in universities, IITs and other institutions, remember that they don’t get funding for research as an institution. They get money for individual researchers who take up projects of importance to them-

selves. So, you must not ask the institute director about what they have done, but the scientist who has received the fund.

We can find ways to engage institu-tions in research by giving them a planned research grant and institute a research council to advise them on how to spend their funds. Students can be involved in such research projects. How-ever, students will be around for a few years only, till they get their degrees and jobs. It would be wiser to create a cadre of staff to do the research work with stu-dents, who can then continue on the projects even after the students have left.

In any system, nature tries a hundred things, but only two to three survive for the next generation. The evolutionary path has a very low success rate. But I am not worried about failure, I believe in trying.

designinga differenceKeen to provide a stimulating setting that promotes creativity, design schools are building campuses that encourage interaction, original thought and idea-exchange. But can architecture actually enhance learning? EDU finds out by Teja LeLe Desai


campus Design Schools


f it weren’t for the architecture of Assisi, Jonas Salk may well not have solved the polio puzzle. The American virologist credited the serene architecture of the famed Italian town’s monastery with providing him the final intellectual impetus for his history-changing discovery.

Architects have long suggested that the built environment has a strong bearing on our psychology,

behaviour and creativity. Now, behavioural scientists are starting to back this theory, claiming that spaces can be designed to promote creativity, alertness, social cohesion and intellectual excellence.

The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, San Diego, USA, has initiated interdis-ciplinary research to promote and advance knowledge that links neuroscience to a growing understanding of human responses to the built environment.

And, at architecture schools in several parts of the world, there are plans to initiate classes in introductory neuroscience.

Over the years, research has linked student behaviour and achievement to the physical environment. Certain designs of facility are known to foster interaction and social inti-macy, keep students focussed and alert and enhance learning.

The built environment – perhaps the only three-dimensional constituent of educational


Design Schools campus



Parul Mittal, a partner in the firm, says transdisciplinary learning was one of the prime concerns guiding SPA’s design.

“There has been a complete shift in how learning actually happens these days. In addition to the interdisciplinary nature of design learning, we feel that learning comes from outside the aca-demic and disciplinary sphere. Our plan

prof pradyumna Vyas Director of the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, speaks to EDU about how the built environment influences design school students’ creative, imaginative and artistic skills

How can the design of modern design schools enhance student learning and ensure an environment that inculcates innovation?

When we are designing schools, we need to create spaces that are more interactive. With cross-disciplinarylearning being the norm at design schools, we need to ensure that there are no boundaries between departments and subjects. That said, institutes should be connected with society and can’t function as isolated islands. I also feel that school buildings should have strong visual characteristics and should be flexible in nature. It is very important that the design ensures a fluid quality, so that the building can adapt to changing needs with time. Any kind of interior should not become a hurdle to creative thinking, so even the furniture needs to be multi-use.

How does the NiD campus at paldi, ahmedabad, foster creativity and imagination?

I find NID the perfect example of what can be termed a flexible structure. The building is designed on agrid and has partitions as and when needed. The beauty is that the design is constantly evolving along with theneeds of the faculty and students. If you want bigger classes, smaller spaces, different openings, a newer look,all you have to do is change the arrangement of the partitions. The changing environment allows students achance to grow with it.

How does NiD’s physical environment engage students and allow them to learn?

We strongly believe that people interaction is the key to performance and learning at design schools. A gooddesign school should be able to harbour creative processes and students without any kinds of boundaries. At NID, the informal spaces foster easy communication and interaction, which is imperative to learning at a design school. The reception area, which is used to display exhibits on steel channels attached to structural concrete ribs, creates another informal setting where students often stand to discuss the changing displays and their learnings. Interaction between faculty and faculty, students and faculty, and others is enhanced, thanks to the kind of spaces created by the layout.

Which other schools come to mind, in india or abroad, for providing an ambience conducive to learning?

When I think of other good schools that provide the perfect learning environment, I think of IIM Bangalore (designed by BV Doshi). The architect has managed to attain the perfect balance between the built environment and nature.

any tips on how new D-schools can give their students an environment to grow and let their ideas blossom?

All new schools have to be more interactive. We need to design keeping in mind the needs of at least the next 100 years. An educational institute cannot be redesigned or shifted after 10-20 years. NID had to open campuses in Gandhinagar and Bangalore because we did not have the space to expand. It is very important to involve students in the design process as their inputs can also provide value. A modern D-school will also need to be energy efficient. That means we need more natural light, natural cooling mechanisms and lots of greenery.

‘Flexibility and interaction are critical’

about boring studios, lecture rooms and preachy lessons.

Gurgaon-based DADA & Partners, a multidisciplinary design firm offering architecture, urban design and planning services, recently proposed the prize-win-ning master plan for the new 20-acre cam-pus of School of Planning and Architec-ture (SPA) in Vasant Kunj, New Delhi.

programmes – gains importance when it comes to creative curricula. Logically, a design school’s basic components include lecture rooms, design and art studios, exhibition spaces, laboratories, workshops, library, material museum, resource centre, auditorium, faculty rooms, a computer centre and a cafeteria. But a design school is not just

Design Schools campus


that may be conflicting. Educational spaces require the non-room to be thought of as much as the room. Circula-tion spaces, public and private thresh-olds and spillover spaces are critical.”

Keeping students’ creativity foremost in mind, the focus was on an open plan, visibility, natural light and opportunities for change. A second phase of construc-tion begins this year. Watch this space.

Citing the new campus of London’s Central Saint Martin College of Art and Design as an impressive blend of spaces and technology that is l ikely to revolutionise learning, Shambi believes that spaces designed for creative processes are modest, silent and absolute in providing the user the spatial experience and tools that inspire, to contemplate and to produce.

“The open-plan foundation studio works as a space for production,” Shambi says. “The space reflects the nature of the course where students are exposed to an intense year of creating and thinking, exploring subjects such as textiles, ceramics, spatial design and conceptual drawing. The stu-dio acts as the backdrop for this activity and can be thought of as a blank canvas.”

The blank canvas concept seems to have worked for the SSD campus. Students’ cre-ativity is obvious as one walks around the courtyard – the walls are replete with murals and sculptures, providing a vista of exhibits that changes with time.

Most designers agree that multi-func-tional spaces, that are flexible and can be

The tradition of fostering creativity in design schools goes way back. The Chandigarh College of Architecture (CCA), one of Le Corbusier’s works, stands as testimony to the master architect’s stunning interpretation of a design school. The institute’s central courtyard is its heart, with all rooms and activit ies radiating from it . The unfinished concrete and bricks, the white walls and front facade of modular colours are design elements that have inspired students down the ages.

Speaking about how design is an integral part of life and not just a subject to be studied at CCA, graduate Apurva Bose Dutta, says: “The courtyard is a major hangout area and creates an interaction space where an exchange of ideas takes place on a regular basis. Such spaces work wonders in design schools. Also, CCA students get a very neat and prac t i ca l demons t ra t i on o f Le Corbusier’s works and ideas as they’re all very much alive on this campus.”

Clearly, a design school should have the ability to harbour creativity without pre-cincts and boundaries. When the Sushant School of Design (SSD), Gurgaon, was being designed, the brief was clear: focus on physical building conditions that influ-ence learning and creativity.

Jitender Shambi, Head of Department at the school, which opened in 2009, says, “Design schools have specific requirements regarding spaces that hap-pily sit together but perform functions

aims to provide opportunities to pro-mote an intense, well-connected and engaging learning environment for stu-dents indoors and outdoors,” Mittal says.

built to Foster LearningAt the new SPA campus, academic buildings are designed to foster learning in every corner and to enable interdisciplinary interaction. Both undergraduate and postgraduate buildings will offer flexible learning and work environments, and will be interspersed with strategically located communal spaces. The layout reflects the fluid nature of learning today. Keeping in mind the changing needs of learning institutes, blueprints have been designed to be flexible – for the initial building stages as well as future phases.

creating Right settingDesigners say that creating the right set-ting for students is important to inculcate creative, imaginative and artistic skills. Only the right design can bring about a D-school that aids learning, unleashes students’ creativity, encourages group activity and stimulates originality.

Sanjay Mohe, the architect behind NIFT, Hyderabad, agrees that knowl-edge-transfer in design schools is not limited to classrooms. “It happens through observation, peer activities, group discussions, etc., and we need to create spaces that fuel the latent creativ-ity in our students,” he says.

Since NIFT is a fashion school where group interact ion and informal discussions are common, Mohe decided to create a series of spaces that would invite students to hang out. There are areas that are open to the sky, workshops overlooking one another, spaces around lockers, open machine and art rooms and a circulation space that combines a ramp and seating to allow students the freedom to pursue their coursework as they like it. “We often see students spreading out their drawings in the courtyard for a tete-a-tete with their seniors or the faculty. They also hold impromptu shows on the ramp, and use the shadows and effects created by the pergolas for photography,” Mohe says.

“We’ve tried to create a malleable but suggestive space that promotes activity and collaboration...We used everything to encourage creative collaboration”—scott WitthoftLecturer, d.School, Stanford University



adapted to different needs, are an impor-tant facet of design schools. The entrance porch-corridor at CCA also comes alive in the form of an exhibition space. “A design school works when students keep adding to the design. At CCA, a lot of sculptures, murals, tensile structures and landscaping elements created by stu-dents have becoming an integral part of the college design,” Bose Dutta says.

At the National School of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, the reception area show-cases informally placed exhibits. The steel channels on structural concrete ribs have display frames that can be adjusted in many different arrangements. At NIFT, Hyderabad, the corridors work as open galleries and exhibition spaces, both for-mal and informal, with students discuss-ing ideas, dressing up mannequins and finalising designs there.

On a campus, casual spaces are known to readily foster communication and interaction. The open plan of the cam-pus at Centre for Environmental Plan-ning and Technology (CEPT), credited to architect BV Doshi, creates a layer of interactive and transition spaces that form the backbone of the design. The many walkways – with a variety of steps and platforms – create a sort of an unforced approach towards the building. The resulting common spaces are often used for informal gatherings, exhibi-tions and games.

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, a cutting-edge school that offers a wide variety of design courses, believes that “space makes peo-ple.” Scott Doorley, a creative director at “d.school”, as it is known, says: “An intentional space can have a great impact on not only the education within the space, but also innovations that derive from innovators. We inherited an inter-esting challenge as we were shuffled between four spaces in four years prior to moving into our current space. These years led to many insights about needs and opportunities for collaborative and creative learning spaces.”

The d.school space was created through a radical collaboration of several groups – the school, two architecture f i rms , the S tanford Schoo l o f

Eng ineer ing and the S tanford Department of Project Management. Office furniture companies, Steelcase and OneWorkplace, were responsible for several of the more experimental materials and artefacts used.

Scott Witthoft, a lecturer at d.School, Stanford University, says: “We’ve tried to create a malleable but suggestive space that biases towards activity and collaboration at the team level. We used everything at our disposal to encourage creative collaboration, such as upright postures to encourage movement and shifting of leadership roles; access to vertical workspace to encourage collective visualisation; prominent, visible storage of work-in-progress to provide a sense of energy; open-plan classrooms to level status relationships between teachers and students; music to set the tone; non-precious materials to encourage making; and contrasting special touches to create a sense of home, safety, and belonging.”

universal spacesThe concept of ‘flexible spaces’ has been around for a long time. SR Crown Hall, the college of architecture at the Illinois Insti-tute of Technology in Chicago, embodies Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s concept of universal space. Charac-terised by an aesthetic of industrial sim-plicity, the structure is one that can be adapted to different uses with varying needs over time. The lower level of the structure comprises compartmentalised rooms, but the upper floor level is a single glass-enclosed architecture studio space, the architect’s ‘universal space’. With no permanent partitions, spaces could be carved out as and when desired and great-er intermingling was possible between students, faculty and staff.

The same concept is followed in the Yale Art and Architecture building. Keen to unify the various forms of arts, archi-tect Paul Rudolph created spaces that would emphasise interaction due to the absence of permanent partitions. Two large open spaces serve as the hub – one as a gallery and meeting room on the main floor, the other as architecture stu-dios on the fourth and fifth floors. All rooms are arranged around these open spaces in a pinwheel-like pattern.

Last, but definitely not the least, a cut-ting-edge design school that allows rethinking the conventions of design practice also needs to provide students and staff with learning add-ons that pro-mote a culture of collaboration – it could be the new-age library at SPA, the Wood-shop at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University or the material museum at CCA.

Talking about the library at the new SPA campus, Mittal says: “The new-age media library commons will be the hub of the campus and encourage the concept of working ‘where you are’, be it the e-cafe or wi-fi-enabled student lobby. The cafeteria, campus centre, auditorium and hostels also embrace similar concepts. There are spaces for interaction, but there are also spaces for quiet reflection.”


“We need to create spaces that

fuel the latent creativity in our

students”—sanjay mohe

Architect, NIFT, Hyderabad


CIntegrated BBA-cum-MBA

programmes:Grooming

young leaders of tomorrow or just a market-

driven exercise?by Charu bahri

Business Education aCademiC


Come October, the portals of IIM Indore, one of India’s leading postgraduate man-agement institutes, will welcome another batch of students, albeit with a difference. This year, 120 young minds, fresh from

school, will take admission in IIM Indore’s newly launched Integrated Post Graduate Programme (IPGP). If the students stay the course, five years down the line they will be awarded the coveted IIM-MBA degree. Students who choose to quit after three years, will be given diplomas equivalent to a BBA degree.

A first in India, the IPGP programme has generated much interest and debate. The education circle is busy debating the pros and cons of integrating the undergraduate and postgraduate management education. Though many have praised the course as the need of the hour, some including those in the highest echelons of the education sector have expressed doubts on the ‘experiment’. Chairman, All India Council for Technical Education and Governing Board Member, SS Mantha, has not been too supportive of the new endeavour – “Courses where students go into management straight after school raise questions because they have no domain knowledge which they can build upon.”

Pros & ConsCertainly, Mantha’s observation raises pertinent questions. On the one hand, there are people like Dr Rajan Saxena, Vice Chancellor and distinguished Professor of Marketing, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai and ex-director, IIM Indore who contend that BBA programmes — management courses in their own right — are to be studied straight after school. Saxena says, “Undergraduate and postgraduate management programmes fu l fi l d i f ferent purposes .” The undergraduate programmes are aimed at preparing first line supervisory and executive staff, both for front-end and back-end positions in the BPO industry. In contrast, students passing out of postgraduate management courses are absorbed in managerial cadres across the industry. Hence, Dr Saxena believes that integrating both programmes simply for the sake of creating better managers may confuse the purpose of each course.

On the other hand, Mantha says that s u p e r - s p e c i a l i s a t i o n a t t h e undergraduate level is a no-no. His opinion is built on the assumption that management education is an extension

adMIN SNIppetS New appoINtMeNtS• Osmania University• BR Ambedkar Open University• Jammu Central UniversityC

dr P Prakash has been appointed as the new Vice Chancellor of BR Ambedkar Open University (BRAOU) in Hyderabad.

He is presently working as the Additional Secretary of University Grants Commission (UGC) at New Delhi. An alumnus of Osmania University, Prakash received the CSIR national scholarship and was also conferred the Young Scientist Award by the Indian Botanical Society. He is the former registrar of Urdu

University, Hyderabad, UGC.

New AppoiNtmeNt | BR Ambedkar Open University

New VC of braOu appointed


aCademiC Business Education

“Students pursuing an MBA after acquiring a

wider knowledge

base get more benefits”

—raj S dhankarDean, FMS, University of Delhi

The Management Group (currently renamed as Department of Management) at BITS Pilani was established in the year 1971. Initially, it offered a two-year MBA programme. In 1973, when the institute

launched an integrated educational structure, MBA evolved into an integrated first degree programme MMS (Master of Management Studies) with a strong foundation in science and engineering. This programme was successfully offered for three decades. The MMS programme absorbed students straight after 10+2. The content was a judicious mix of mathematics, science, engineering, computers, analytics and all the basic management courses.

Based on the feedback from the industry, BITS Pilani introduced a new MBA programme in 2006. Applicants are required to have a first degree from BITS or its equivalent. The new programme endeavours to create manpower with a scientific and engineering approach to business administration. Students are also given reasonable exposure to certain modern technologies. Flexibility and a very strong component comprising industry project experience are incorporated into the programme.

The biTS Pilani experience

of graduate studies in the disciplines of arts, science, engineering, or commerce. “Management is an applied science; applied in real time. Since ‘situations’ needing to be managed exist in many walks of life including business, management studies are best built on a basic discipline. A sound base helps students understand the practice of management, and this know-how may then easily be extrapolated to other areas,” he says.

Some educationists concur with this view that students who have already done their graduate studies derive more benefit from postgraduate management education. “Students pursuing an MBA after acquiring a wider knowledge base get more benefits out of the course vis-à-vis regular BBA graduates,” agrees Pro-fessor Raj S Dhankar, Dean, Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), University of Delhi. He notes that most of USA’s l e a d i n g B - s c h o o l s o f f e r MBA programmes.

is integration a bad idea?Engineering, science, and liberal arts graduates get more out of an MBA course because they bring more to the

table. Unlike undergraduate students, their minds are not raw and many of them also have industry exposure, thanks to rigorous internship that forms a part of their studies. “Engineering and science graduates have developed sound technical skills. Students drawn from a liberal arts background bring a lot of creativity and essential writing skills. Such skil ls blend well with the management techniques they learn during an MBA programme and make for we l l -g rounded , a l l - rounder managers,” says Saxena.

So, is integration a bad idea per se? “No,” says Saxena adding, “it’s just a question of knowing what subjects can be integrated to best meet the needs of the industry.” He believes the answer lies in integration that cuts across disci-plines – management with technology, management with architecture, manage-ment with healthcare, etc.

It’s not as though no change has taken place in B-schools’ curricula. Professor Dishan Kamdar, Senior Associate Dean, Academic Programmes, Indian School of Business, points out that most of the leading global B-schools have made revisions or completely revamped their curriculum in the last five years. Still, more changes are required to ensure that the curriculum has rigour and is cutting-edge and global. “Integrated courses that enhance the functional and cross-functional expertise of students will ensure that the curriculum stays relevant,” adds Kamdar.

adding value to bba degreesManagement as a subject comes neither under art nor science streams. Rather, it’s an interdisciplinary course of study. Possibly, that is why American under-graduate management courses offer stu-dents the choice of social subjects like history and geography. In contrast, Indi-an BBA programmes have adopted a narrow structured syllabus centred on industry and trade. Professor Dhankar is of the opinion that the American system offers students a much more comprehensive MBA pro-gramme, and if they choose to study


Business Education aCademiC

management at the postgraduate level as well, it enhances their knowledge and skills further. “Whereas if a BBA student in India were to go for an MBA, the value addition in terms of knowledge is very restricted.”

In this context, IIM Indore’s IPGP programme promises to be a cut above the regular BBA courses. A press release issued by the institute says that 40 per cent of the course will be a medley of social science subjects like history and political science with a fare sprinkling of mathematics, statistics, logic and computer science.

The course has been structured thus, possibly to help students develop essential rationalising skills. Soft skills and biological sciences will be included as well. Functional areas of management will constitute half of the course content,

Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Sec-retary SS Bloeria has been appointed as the first Vice Chancellor of the Central Universi-ty at Jammu. Bloeria is a 1968 batch IAS offi-cer who rose to become the chief secretary of the state in 2003 and retired in 2005. He is a native of Jammu. Earlier, Amitabh Mattoo, an internationally acclaimed academician and international affairs expert, was appointed to the post but he refused to join citing personal reasons.

New AppoiNtmeNt | Jammu university

First VC of Central Varsity

global trend towards integrated interdisci-plinary or multidisciplinary programmes. In her view, “An innovative approach, cur-riculum design and delivery, tailor the course to the needs of the academia and industry. This can spell success for any scholastic programme, even an integrated management programme.” Balance is the key – a well-composed course can provide students with the grounding that will equip them for the future, she says.

There aren’t enough examples of integrated management programmes, to either praise or pan the IPGP course. From a market perspective though, it will find many takers. When two years at an IIM promises a line-up of jobs from the best companies, parents and students alike will buy into the premise that a five-year course at one of India’s leading management institutes will only

“An innovative approach, curriculum design and delivery, tailor the course to the needs of the academia and industry”—aparna Prasad, Member, Academic Council, Jain University

while one-tenth of the programme will focus on giving students international exposure and internship in social organisations across India. The variety in course design seems intended to ensure that students receive broad-based knowledge, and thereby addresses the challenge of ‘early specialisation’, for which the institute has been criticised. It is also being said that this course curriculum design is based on the institute’s experience in teaching postgraduate students, who are found lacking in understanding of social aspects and subjects such as business law or business history.

Global Trend Towards integrated ProgrammesAccording to Aparna Prasad, Member, Aca-demic Council, Jain University, there is a

The Government of Andhra Pradesh has appointed Prof S Satyanarayana as the new Vice Chancellor of Osmania University. He is currently the Registrar of Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies (RGUKT) and has over two decades of experience in university education. Beginning his career in 1983, as NSS programme officer at Osmania University, Satyanarayana took over as its Directorate of Admissions in 2002. He was appointed as the principal of Nizam College in 2006, and later became the registrar of RGUKT.

New AppoiNtmeNt | osmania university

Osmania gets its 23rd VC

aCademiC Business Education

brighten their future prospects.But educationists are of the opinion

that integrated management courses are not likely to cause much of a stir across India Inc. “Students undergoing integrated regular BBA and MBA programmes will possess knowledge in only one stream – management. They will be more adept at running the monetary aspects of a business, rather than becoming good leaders. India needs agents of change. We need great leaders, even if they are not the best managers,” says Professor Dhankar.

Also, people possessing undergraduate degrees in alternate disciplines will have an edge over ‘pure’ managers when the job market for management professionals shrinks. That is not to say that graduates from sought-after educational brands like the IIMs (case in point, IIM Indore’s IPGP) will not be hired by the industry. “Students from such premier institutes will be hired anyway. But students under-going integrated management courses from unknown institutions are not likely to be in demand,” he adds.

If they do, will they continue to be known for their academic rigour and in-depth industry research or will the move dilute their brand? The jury is still out on that.

iPGP: Leader of Change? A lot of future initiatives hang on the fate of IPGP: Will its fresh design succeed? Will it usher in a new era of management education in India? Will more leading postgraduate B-schools take the plunge to cater to students across the management education spectrum?

Challenges to integration

FaCuLTy: High-quality research-oriented faculty can strengthen the learning and research culture amongst students. Institutes adopting the integrated pattern may need separate faculty to teach undergraduate students, who have raw, yet more creative minds. They question more and are less exposed to the industry. While some faculty members may not mind teaching undergraduates, all postgraduate-level teachers cannot be expected to comply.

diSCrimiNaTiON beTweeN STudeNTS: Discrimination between students cannot be ruled out with those who have cracked a highly competitive admission test getting preferential treatment. The integrated course’s students may be perceived as being of lower calibre.


advts.indd 56 12/22/2009 3:02:47 PM

All Advts.indd 33 2/1/2010 10:38:44 AM


Thin Client, Fat BenefitsHigher education institutes can reap the benefits of going lean with thin clients – an innovative technology with many benefitsBy Tushar kanwar

I t’s the quintessential dilem-ma for administrators and IT heads of higher education institutions – how to rein in IT spending without compro-

mising the IT learning experience. Especially, given the increasing role IT plays in today’s classrooms, and the fact that the unstoppable advancements in technology threaten to virtually make any investment in IT obsolete. There is hope though in the innovative yet diminutively named technology called ‘thin’ clients. We spoke to leading solu-tion providers and institutions that have implemented thin clients in their cam-puses to understand the important con-siderations and choices you have to make when going for one.

54 Tech TuTes: Blog

51-55 Tech snippeT: Technology news and Tips and Tricks

TECHNOLOGY

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oto

s.c

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Thin Clients TEChnOLOGy

what are Thin Clients?At its most basic level, a thin client is any technology solution that allows data and processing to be located away from the desktop user, typically on one or several server computers in a secure data centre. Each user on the node of the network runs his/her own ‘virtual machine’ – with i ts own operat ing system, applications, stored data and personal settings – over the network. Imagine a scenario in your campus, where the students can log in from shared terminals in computer labs and classrooms, and have the same desktop and programs running when they reach their dormitories or hostels.

Big on Benefits Clearly, thin computing implementa-tions make a lot of financial sense, and the most attractive benefits of desktop virtualisation come from costs savings on several fronts, according to Manish Sharma, Vice President, APAC, NCom-puting, a player in the virtualised com-puting space. Giving an example to dem-onstrate the low cost of entry, Sharma says that a 30-seat computer lab built using a traditional ‘all-PC’ deployment would cost four times as much com-pared to a desktop virtualisation model. But it’s not only upfront acquisition costs that are reduced. Studies also show

a 75 per cent saving, as compared to tra-ditional PC environments, in ongoing support costs, such as, installation, maintenance and replacement. Add to it the power consumption savings – depending on the thin client devices selected, an institution can save up to 90 per cent on electricity costs as compared to traditional power-consuming infra-structure like standalone desktop PCs.

Looking beyond pure numbers, thin clients help organisations bring in pro-ductivity benefits for their IT staff as well. Since the applications and data reside on the servers, installation time is dramatically reduced with far fewer devices to configure and install. Abhilesh Guleria, Country Head, Multimedia Product Group and IT Platform Busi-ness, NEC India, says that easy manage-

ability tips the scales in the favour of IT virtualisation. New applications and upgrades, including latest security patches, are loaded only once onto the server, and become instantly available on all devices, regardless of age, platform or hardware configuration, obliterating the need to individually touch each thin cli-ent device to install software. Since these devices are essentially network termi-nals, they have very few moving parts and are less susceptible to breakdowns. With fewer variations between thin cli-ent hardware, troubleshooting is much easier for support staff and users.

usual hiccupsAs with any user-facing roll-out, the big-gest challenge around thin client com-puting is managing end-user expecta-

Google’s appInventer was an ambitious project: trying to make it possible for non-developers to create Android appli-cations. AppInventor, which started off an invite-only product, was recently made available to all, as part of Google Labs.

Initially, Google Labs’ shutting down meant that AppInventer would no longer have a home. Fortunately, it is not the case, as Google has announced that AppInventer will be open-sourced and it has found a home in a new MIT Centre for Mobile Learning, at MIT’s Media Lab. The new centre will be run by professors Hal Abelson, Eric Klopfer and Mitchel Resnick of MIT.

For those who have not heard of Google AppInventer, it is a browser-based application by Google that allows anyone to

TECH SNIppET | Mobile learning

appInventer Lives on create an Android application without writing any code. Instead, one could lay out the user interface (UI) of the application using a simple drag-drop interface, similar to those found in visual UI layout tools in International Development Enterprise (IDE). The web application can even be used to debug directly from the web UI.

As part of MIT’s Centre for Mobile Learning, the focus of AppInventer will be research-based and as a tool to aid education. AppInventer started under MIT with major contributions from them, and is now back in MIT’s hands.

“a 30-seat computer lab built using a traditional ‘all-PC’ deployment would cost four times as much, compared to a desktop virtualisation model”—Manish sharmaVP, aPaC, nComputing


TEChnOLOGy Thin Clients

In a bid to make online search more intuitive, Google has made some notable improvements to its ‘sitelinks’ format. Google, on its official blog, says the search engine has “expanded and improved” the sitelink feature, which you may recall, as the links beneath the main URL you get after searching for particular terms on Google.

As you can also see, the font size appears to be larger and all the subsidiary links have small descriptions or snippets beneath them. Moreover, the maximum number of sitelinks per query has been increased from 8 to 12, depending on

TECH SNIppET | online SearCH

Google Improves sitelink Feature

tions and acceptance. According to Sharma, historically, thin client solu-tions meant users had to compromise on performance to achieve cost advan-tages. It is no longer the case, with vir-tual desktops such as NComputing’s L300 devices and others, able to deliver

PC-like performance, including full-motion multimedia playback. Some ven-dors, including NComputing, package ‘classroom-in-a-box’ solutions which allow institutions to literally take it out-of-the-box and get rolling. In addition, users may need training in the new sys-

tem, especially some groups of users who are uncomfortable with less control over their computing environment. Administrators will need to stress the advantages, such as the ability to access one’s desktop and applications from any location, to convince the reluctant staff.

the size of the website.“It turns out that sitelinks are quite useful

because they can help predict which sections of the site you want to visit. Even if

you didn’t specify your task in the query, sitelinks help you quickly navigate to the most

relevant part of the site, which is particularly handy for large and complex websites. Sitelinks can also give you a good overview of a website’s content, and let webmasters expose areas of the site that visitors may not know about,” says Google’s blog.

Google has also made some improvements to its algorithms, combining the sitelinks with regular search result rankings. Google says it will give higher-quality links.

“we, at amity, were able to derive huge benefits”

In Conversation with Js sodhi, assistant Vice President, aKC Data Systems (amity group)

what were the considerations that compelled amity to go for the thin client implementation — stated needs and benefits you were

looking to derive from the implementation? Amity has always supported eco-friendly projects. We

feel that it is our social responsibility to use technologies which are green and consume less energy. We were also looking for a solution that delivers significant cost savings which we can re-invest in software and services for our students.

With the desktop virtualisation implementation by NComputing, we, at Amity, were able to derive huge benefits (see Sample ROI Calculation), both in business and social terms. For example, we have replaced our UPS of 10 KVA with a 3 KVA version for each 40 computer lab, bringing the electrical consumption down substantially. Consider this – typical desktops consumed around 180

watts, while the NComputing solution consumes just 5 watts – leading to less heat in the lab and greater cooling impact. Plus the productivity benefits – the virtual PC boots up much faster than a regular PC, and we are able to administer the systems in a far more effective manner. With the reduced maintenance, now one lab administrator can easily handle multiple labs without any difficulty.

what were the various virtualisation vendors you considered for the thin client implementation?

We explored various options like VM Ware thin client with Wyse, HP thin client terminal, Citrix with thin client terminal and NComputing Adaptors, finally choosing NComputing.

Please tell us about the scale of your thin client roll-out?

At Amity, we implemented 40 units of NComputing’s L300 product as access devices, each device with a monitor, keyboard, mouse and network port, and connecting to one of the many servers or environments depending on what application the user wanted to put the device to.



Intel Capital has established a $300 mn fund to assist companies across the world to develop hardware and software technologies for its upcoming ultra-thin laptops ‘Ultrabook’. According to reports, the company is scouting for Indian hardware and software companies for this purpose. Intel’s fund, to be spent in the next three to four years, is aimed at enhancing people’s interaction with Ultrabooks — a new class of computing devices that blends the capabilities of laptops with tablet-like features.

Ultrabooks are less than an inch in thickness. Intel believes

Thapar university, Punjab: Apart from the multitude of servers and over a hundred PCs that form the Computer Centre at Thapar are 16 SUN thin clients that form the core of the Cyber Surfing Lab. Here, students can log in with their own credentials on each of these devices for the duration they wish to browse the internet, which allows sharing these terminals without compromising individual privacy.

shoolini university, himachal Pradesh: At Shoolini University, the University IT centre encompasses one central lab with 100 computers (thin clients) for general surfing purposes.

Bradford College (uk): As one of the biggest universities in the United Kingdom with three campuses, 30,000 students and 2,500 employed staff, Bradford College had planned to reduce the burden of the existing PC installation at one of its campuses. NEC IT implemented 360 of their US100 thin client terminals with eight of their VPCC servers, reducing not only the TCO, but delivering a solution where each terminal was capable of full-screen flash video and RFID card security.

Case studies: how they Did IT

TECH SNIppET | UlTra-THin laPToPS

Intel sets up $300 mn Fund for ultrabooks

way to go LeanWith the maturing of the desktop virtualisation space, many vendors can roll-out standard solutions – campus-wide or multi-site deployments – in a short period of time. However, as Sharma suggests, in order to achieve the maximum benefits possible, institutions should invest significant effort internally and also with the bidding vendors into planning the design. For optimising potential benefit, one fundamental task should be to evaluate whether a migration makes sense for all or some of an educational institution’s users. While it may sound like a good idea on paper, thin clients may not suit the work d e m a n d s o f a l l u s e r s . C l i e n t virtualisation works best for users who access a limited number of standardised applications, not for certain staff who need a larger variety of programs or intense computing power. The fit may not be ideal, as well, for legacy or graphics-heavy applications used within graphic design departments.

Post the initial planning, Sharma adds that it is essential for any institu-tion to engage with partners that have practical, commercial, and technical experience, and have achieved success in similar implementations. Service level agreements, purchasing, user requirements capture, LAN/WAN, tele-coms, server, desktop, terminal services and application integration, are just some of the skills on which administra-

tors and institution heads should be evaluating a potential partner.

JS Sodhi from the Amity Group adds an institution administrator’s unique perspective to the decision-making pro-cess. He recommends that institutions looking towards desktop virtualisation, consider a number of factors – what applications are commonly used and how often, the number of users and their geographic location, and the exist-ing network availability – all of these

decide the scale of a roll-out. A good sys-tem should also build in load balancing features, and issue management and monitoring features. Any good vendor should be able to fit in their virtualisa-tion solution within your existing IT infrastructure, and not necessarily need to start from scratch.

the sleek build puts them in a new genre of sub-notebook — perhaps mini notebook or ultraportable. Apart from being ultra-sleek, the Ultrabook is a feature-rich device. The device, Intel says, will start up instantly, have a long battery life, a sensitive touch screen and will support all the PC-type apps that do not work on tablets presently. The devices are expected to be priced starting from $1,000. Intel hopes the new device will help gain nearly 40 per cent of the laptop market by the end of 2012.



TEChnOLOGy Thin Clients

want the world to be your stage? here’s how…

Blogging is a great outlet for teachers and adminis-trators to build awareness about issues in education; share information and

best practices with one another; and bring about systemic change. Even if your goals aren’t as far reaching, and you just want to set up a blog as a hobby (cooking, or perhaps photography), here’s the lowdown on what you need to do to get a basic blog up and running.

Get Started: Before you can start ham-mering out blog posts and gaining a dedicated reader base, you will need to set aside a few minutes to sign up for a new blog, tweak the set-tings to your needs, and generally get acquainted with the whole process. For the purpose of this tutorial, we’ve picked WordPress.com, arguably the most popular hosted and free blogging platform in the world, though you can as well go with the Google-powered Blogger platform – it really comes down to individual preference.

that menu, you’re starting to feel overwhelmed, don’t worry; you really only need to know your way around a few key parts of the dashboard, to start using your blog. As you get more familiar with WordPress.com and want to extend your blog capabilities in new ways, you can explore some of the other menus, learning at your own pace.

For now, head to the General settings menu. Here you can change the site title, an explanation of what the site is about, and common settings such as time-zone, date/time format and privacy settings (is it visible to everyone, including search engines like Google, or just to readers?).

Get Writing: Assuming you’re clear what you’re going to be writing about (that’s why you started this blog in the first place, right?), you will want to pick a theme that suits your style or the subject you intend to cover. Head over to the Appearance > Themes area of your

Head over to the www.wordpress.com and click on the orange ‘Get started here’ but-ton. You will need to then choose a domain name – a unique name that will identify your blog to your potential read-ers – so think wisely. You’ll need a few details like a username, a password and an email address and that’s it – your blog is ready to use at yourchosenname.word-press.com (where ‘yourchosenname’ is the name you chose for your blog).

Get Familiar: Once you’ve signed up and verified your email address, your blog is ready to use and the first place you should head to, is the dashboard, the behind-the-scenes control panel where

you can publish content, manage comments, and change your settings, etc. This is the view of your blog only you can see; in a w a y t h e b a c k - o f f i c e operations that keep your blog ‘front desk’ running. Take a look around the dashboard – you should see an auto-generated post titled ‘Hello world!’, and a big menu in the left sidebar. If by the sight of

rEaDEr rOI You can include your personal blog link on your university page or your email signature, if the content guidelines allow it

Your can blog about a hobby, say cooking

Blog on: Teachers and administrators can use blogs to great effect for spreading awareness

Tech TuTesShare your Thoughts – Blog



adobe has recently released a preview of yet another HTML-based design tool after EDGE. The new tool code-named ‘Muse’, allows a person with no knowledge of web development languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create websites. The application offers a design-oriented interface, which, those working with the print media will be familiar with.

The sites created with Muse can be exported to HTML code or directly published to Adobe’s own Business Catalyst service. It does not currently support CMSs; instead it generates the entire code structure for a website, which can be directly uploaded to a web server.

TECH SNIppET | Web DeSign

adobe releases Muse

Get started with our tutorial and sign up for a new blog with one of the many blogging sites

Expand your reader base by providing links to your blog on your social and

professional networking accounts along with your email account; wait for

the praise to flow in. You are now a veteran blogger

dashboard, and select a theme. For example, if you’re planning a photo blog, you will want to choose a theme that allows your images to take centre stage on your site, so pick a theme with a lot of space for your visual content. For most folks though, the default ‘Twenty Eleven’ theme is sufficient. Don’t worry even if you can’t make up your mind while picking the perfect theme, you can always change the theme later.

Now that your design is set, let’s create a test post for your blog. Log in to your Word-Press.com dashboard, and head to ‘Posts’ menu and pick the ‘Add New’ option.

In the page that loads, write up a title for the post – imagine that it is a head-line for your content. Below the title, you will see a visual editor (much like you would see in a web-based email like Gmail), which allows you to easily cre-ate, edit, and format the content of your post. Type in the text, play around with the formatting options, and when you’re done, you can either choose to save the posts any time (without sharing them on your blog) by hitting the ‘Save Draft’ but-ton, or if you’re ready, hit ‘Publish’.

Once you’re familiar with posting, you can add in more content, by way of links to other reading material/sites, images, videos – in each case, WordPress makes it exceedingly easy to post such content.

Get Networked: Once you’ve gotten

down to a rhythm of publishing your posts, you should head out and solicit readers. For example, you can include your personal blog link on your university page or your email signature, if the content guidelines allow it. Post about it on social media – Twitter or

Facebook – and have friends and family chime in with their comments. From there on, the world is your oyster!


One can easily insert widgets such as menus, featured news boxes, image galleries, light boxes, etc. The application will automatically generate a menu, based

on the structure you define for the website in its Plan view. The menu entries will even

be kept in sync with the changes made in the site’s structure.

The application also lets one add random HTML code snippets, which can allow for embedding maps for Google maps, Twitter widgets and pretty much everything else. This added code can then be placed anywhere on the page just like any other widget.

Muse will only be available on subscription because Adobe would like to release features for it faster than the yearly cycle they intend to maintain for Creative Suite.


perspectiveF r o m o F h i g h e r e d u c a t i o n

the global

Academics are working with the business community to use biotechnology for development By Steven amBruS

scientists tap columbia’s biodiversity to boost Development

When Lucia Atehortúa returned to Columbia in 1983 after completing a doctorate in botany at the City University of New York, she was astounded to find that Columbia’s scientists were almost completely

ignoring the nation’s immense biodiversity. With between 45,000 and 55,000 plant species, Columbia is among the world’s

treasure trove: A consortium of universities is working to tap Columbia’s rich biological reserve

three most bio diverse countries, but no one seemed interested in tapping its vast biological treasure trove to make money or improve people’s health and standard of living.

Fast-forward 28 years and Atehortúa’s laboratory at the University of Antioquia, in Medellín, is packed full with dozens of PhD’s and graduate students working on a variety of projects, including bio fuels that don’t impinge on agricultural land and the enhancement of foods using extracts from herba-ceous plants, algae, and fungi. National energy, food, and cosmetics companies line up to hire out the lab’s services, and Atehortúa has four patents in the Unit-ed States with seven more pending.

The University of Antioquia is a public university and one of the nation’s premier research centres. It

has built much of its reputation on basic and medical sciences but focuses increasingly on biodiversity and biotechnology.

It is not alone. A consortium of four other universities in Medellín is working under contract with private business to perfect techniques of pyrolysis, the thermochemical decompo-sition of organic material, to produce cleaner energy from cof-fee-bean husks and waste-water sludge. Other universities around the country are working to produce cosmetics and cures for malaria and tuberculosis from rainforest plants,

58 | Latin American Nations Push Students Abroad60 | European Universities Concerned About Funds

inSide

gloBal.chronicle.com


Sign up for a free weekly electronic newsletter from The

Chronicle of Higher Education at Chronicle.Com/Globalnewsletter

The Chronicle of Higher Education is a US-based company with a weekly newspaper and a website updated daily, at Global.Chronicle.com, that cover all aspects of university life. With over 90 writers, editors, and correspondents stationed around the globe, The Chronicle provides

timely news and analysis of academ-ic ideas, developments and trends.

while others still aim to develop industrial and medical products that can withstand extreme temperatures, from micro-organisms found in high-mountain glaciers.

“There has been an ever greater interest over the last 10 years in making Columbia a regional centre for biodiversi ty and biotechnology research,” said Mauricio Rodríguez, the biotechnology manager at Colciencias, the government agency in charge of formulating science and technology policy in the country. “There is a push at the universi t ies to develop the physical infrastructure and human resources so that Columbia can develop bio fuels, biomaterials, and medicines from its rich offerings of flora and fauna.”

The move away from an exclusive emphasis on basic to more applied sciences in the academic world comes as both rural areas and cities like Medellín, the nation’s second largest, seek to break out of an antiquated 20th-century model of raw-material exploitation and manufacturing to embrace more globalised, high-tech markets.

It also comes as Columbia’s government advances steadily in its nearly 50-year-old war with Marxist guerrillas. With security conditions ever better, huge areas of mountain forest and jun-gle have been opened up to scientific research. Plants and ani-mals once out of reach are now at the fingertips of university scientists, and ideas for new products abound.

Atehortúa, whose small, rounded face and impish smile give her the air at 60 of a somewhat older Audrey Tautou, believes the nation’s universities are slowly but surely moving down a path of great promise in which they will use biodiversity to spur scientific creativity, new inventions, and new biotech compa-nies. “There is the feeling in both the academic and business communities that we can use biotechnology to give added value to the raw materials of nature, create business opportunities, and improve energy and health.”

Atehortúa specialises in growing plant cells in vitro and developing biofuels from micro-organisms. The University of Antioquia supplies the infrastructure, but most of her $1.5 to

$2 mn annual budget comes from Columbi-an companies interested in the practical applications. An animal-food company and an ice cream firm, for example, finance efforts to use extracts from medicinal mush-rooms with anti-cancer and cardiovascular-boosting properties to enhance the health benefits of their products.

Meanwhile, Empresas Públicas de Medellín, the city-owned utility and energy company, is banking on her work to develop new bio fuels from microalgae and from a tropical bush seed to catapult their business into the world of alternative energy.

“We are interested in technologies that allow you to produce fuels on an industrial scale without using huge tracts of land that current biofuels, like ethanol or biodiesel, require,” said Sergio Montoya, the utility’s Deputy Director for Energy Research and Develop-

ment. “We believe it will be a huge niche for business as con-cerns over climate warming intensify in the 21st century.”

One floor below Atehortúa’s lab, scientists insert a DNA sam-ple into a genome sequencer and watch as the machine’s screen produces spherical representations of genetic matter etched in green. The $2 mn machine was given to the university by Roche Pharmaceuticals in exchange for tax exemptions in Columbia, making the country the fifth in Latin America after Mexico, Bra-zil, Argentina, and Chile to have such a facility. Eighteen months later, the university is already negotiating with private businesses on genome studies ranging from potato disease to changes in the human intestine brought about by certain foods.

the coffee-Berry BorerThe most advanced project, however, is one dear to the coffee farmer Jorge Hernández, who lives 112 miles away in the heart of Columbian coffee country. Hernández’s family has been grow-ing coffee for more than 60 years, and his fields on a steep moun-tain slope are carpeted with iridescent coffee bushes. Nonethe-less, for more than a decade, he and his family have been fighting a seemingly hopeless battle against a pernicious black-winged beetle called the coffee-berry borer, which burrows into coffee beans, lays its eggs there, and destroys them from inside.

Hernández throws his hands up in despair when he thinks of the destruction. Despite all efforts to eradicate it using insecti-cides and bug-killing fungi, the beetle costs him and other Columbian coffee farmers up to 20 per cent of their profits each year and inflicts losses running into hundreds of millions of dol-lars in dozens of coffee-producing countries where it persists.

“God willing, they will destroy this bug,” he says. “It is costing us dear in worry, sweat, and money.”

Hernández places his hopes in the university’s sequencing centre and the research it is conducting in collaboration with the country’s National Coffee Grower’s Federation, into the berry borer’s genome. The idea is to identify the genes that

“...we can use biotechnology to... create business opportunities and improve energy and health”

the gloBal PerSPective


draw the bug to the coffee bean, and then either to develop new resistant varieties of coffee or introduce strains of the insect less aggressive in using the beans as a host.

The stakes are high for Columbia. With more than 550,000 growers, the country is the world’s fourth largest coffee pro-ducer. For the coffee federation, the collaboration with the high-ly trained scientists at the University of Antioquia and the access to their genome sequencer is worth every cent of the $90,000 they are paying for the first six months of the study.

“Before we had to risk damaging our DNA samples in transport to Russia, Korea, or the States,” said Pablo Benavides, Head of the federation’s Research Team. “Now we can do it here, with people who speak the same language and have the same concerns.”

Whether the University of Antioquia can help to find a solu-tion to the plague of the coffee-berry borer, or to the numerous other problems that intrigue and vex the private sector, is an open question. So too is the future of the still nascent biotech-nology laboratories at Columbia’s universities.

Subscribe to a free weekly electronic newsletter from the Chronicle of Higher Education at http://chronicle.com/globalnewsletter

But the US government, which signed a science-and-technology cooperation agreement with Columbia in 2010, seems optimistic. It has witnessed the Columbian government’s commitment to investing in applied sciences, especially biotechnology and renewable energy. It has seen the government’s support for universities generally, and it considers the nation to be the “next rising science star and partner for collaboration with the United States” after years of working with countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, according to Frances Colón, an environment and science adviser at the US State Department.

Atehortúa is hopeful as well. “I believe this is the future. I expect my students to generate spinoffs from our work. I expect them to invent new products and build new industries that will create jobs and wealth for our country.”

The Brazilian government announced this year that it plans to give 75,000 schol-arships for local students to study abroad by 2014.

But when officials tell students how and where they might apply, some can’t quite get their heads around it.

“I can feel that they are thinking, This can’t be for me, it has to be for someone else, maybe for those with PhDs or more advanced degrees,” said Thais Pires, Head of Alumni Advising-Education USA. “They want to know more, but lots of them can’t believe it.”

The disbelief is perhaps understand-able given the unprecedented scope of the programme, Science Without Bor-ders. But the vast new effort is indicative of a broad trend up and down the region.

More Latin American students are going abroad, largely to the United b

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Apart from brazil, Chile and El Salvador are also planning to offer incentives to their students to study abroad By andrew downie

latin american Nations push students abroad

opportunity: Latin American countries are offering scholarships to students for studying abroad



States, to study (although their numbers still lag way behind students from Asia), and governments across the continent are using some of their newfound wealth to increase the numbers further through generous scholarship programmes.

In addition to Brazil, nations as diverse as Chile and El Salvador have offered or are planning to offer new incentives to get their students into foreign programmes.

“They are all trying to increase dramat-ically the number of students they send abroad,” said Samir Zaveri, International Operations Director for BMI, a company that organises education fairs in Latin America. “The idea is that they come back with more skills and help the econ-omy and help with its growth, especially in areas where there are shortages.”

That is especially clear in Brazil, the biggest country in South America and the world’s seventh largest economy. Bra-zil is growing fast, but it struggles to find the researchers, engineers, and highly skilled workers to maintain that growth.

The 75,000 scholarships offered by the government of President Dilma Rousseff, as well as an additional 25,000 slated to come from the private sector, are exclu-sive to fields of national interest such as science, technology, and engineering.

They will come from the Federal Agen-cy for Support and Evaluation of Gradu-ate Education (Capes) and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

“Capes will manage 40,000 scholar-ships, and CNPq will manage 35,000 scholarships,” said Denise Neddermey-er, Director of International Affairs for Capes. The other 25,000 scholarships “will cover areas with an important tech-nological impact, such as engineering, hard science, mathematics, energy, sus-tainable development, environment, bio-technology, and health”.

That focus is shared by governments across the region, large and small. El Sal-vador, for example, created a vice minis-try of science and technology in 2009.

The Central American nation provides 35 scholarships a year for students to study abroad, but it is planning to add another 150 to that number over the next three years, said José Marroquin, the Engi-

neer in charge of Becas Fantel, the govern-ment’s main scholarship programme. The additional places are for students pur-suing subjects important to the country, such as environment and health.

Ecuador this month announced its most ambitious scholarship programme yet, with the aim of sending more than 1,000 students abroad, while Colombia will send more people overseas in 2011 than in the 18 previous years put together.

And Chile plans to offer 30,000 schol-arships by 2018 through a programme called Becas Chile. The $6 bn scheme was started by former President Michelle Bachelet in 2008 and replaced the small-er President of the Republic scholarships.

Like in many other national scholar-ship programmes, those who win Becas

Grants given to Latin American students on Fulbright programmes tripled to $21 mn in 2010, from $7.5 mn in 2000, said Jenny Verdaguer, Branch C h i e f f o r Fu l b r i g h t We s t e r n Hemisphere programmes.

The leading contributors today are Chile and Brazil, two of the fastest grow-ing countries in the hemisphere. They replace Mexico and Argentina, two nations that underwent harsh economic times during the last decade.

Not coincidentally, new programmes are being discussed with Panama, Para-guay, and Peru, economies that grew 7.5, 15.3, and 8.8 per cent respectively in 2010.

“I think that the willingness of govern-ments to send students abroad is predi-cated on their economic resources, and

Grants given to Latin American students on Fulbright programmes tripled to $21 mn in 2010, from $7.5 mn in 2000

Chile scholarships sign a contract agree-ing to return home after completing their studies and work for “the good of the country”. Its sheer size has proved a particular boon to less-well-off students.

“One new student who just came here is from the south of Chile, and five or six years ago that would have been impossi-ble,” said Cristian Castro, a Chilean stu-dent earning a doctorate in history at the University of California at Davis. “The best thing that Michelle Bachelet did was to democratise it. People who never imag-ined leaving the country can now do so.”

Foreign-currency reservesOne key factor in making this all possible is that Latin American governments have huge reserves of foreign currency thanks to the worldwide thirst for commodities like copper, iron ore, soy beans, and sugar.

if they have that they can dream large,” Verdaguer said in a telephone interview from Washington.

The increased investment in Fulbright programmes “is very much a function of improved economic conditions in the region,” she added.

While continued economic growth would thus appear to be a prerequisite for longer-term continuance of the schol-arships schemes, there are other obsta-cles, not least of which is the commit-ment of Latin governments to actually carry out such grandiose plans.

Other issues include how readily their foreign degrees will be accepted at home — Brazilians getting doctorates abroad must go through a lengthy process to validate their qualification — as well as ensuring that students come back and share their knowledge, as stipulated in their contracts.

the gloBal PerSPective


As global financial markets gyrate and national economies on both sides of the Atlantic face unfamiliar perils, the potential implications for higher education in Europe are worrying.

European higher-education systems remain for the most part publicly financed, and as cash-strapped gov-ernments have cut public spending in recent years, universities in several countries have suffered the consequences. This latest wave of economic turmoil could further hinder public financ-ing for universities and alternative revenue streams, including philanthropy, on which many institutions have become increas-ingly dependent. Stubbornly high unemployment rates in sev-eral countries mean that young graduates are less likely than ever to find work, putting further strains on already-stretched social safety networks and pushing colleges to focus more on teaching job skills. And a readiness by young Europeans to take to the streets to protest austerity measures, as in Britain, Spain, and other nations, adds an unpredictable dimension to an already-volatile situation.

The European University Association, a Brussels-based organisation that represents higher-education institutions and rectors in 47 countries, has been tracking the global economic crisis and its impact on higher education since 2008. In a report published in June, it said that, although the extent to which different countries have been shaken by the volatility

the latest wave of economic turmoil could further hinder public financing and alternative revenue streams for varsities By aiSha laBi

european Universities concerned about Funds

varies considerably, “the economic crisis has left few higher-education systems unaffected”.

Public money accounts for, on average, 75 per cent of Euro-pean universities’ income, and such reliance on government financing “means that any change in this funding source can potentially have the highest impact,” the report says. As with previous analyses, the association’s most-recent report empha-sises that the impact of the financial turmoil on higher-educa-tion systems has varied significantly across Europe.

In some countries, including England, Greece, Italy, and Ire-land, universities have been subjected to cuts of more than 10 per cent. Greece’s youth-unemployment rate of more than 40 per cent is among Europe’s highest, and its economy has been the focus of concerted European bailout efforts for the past sev-eral months. The report calls the situation there “critical,” not-ing that the Greek student population “has been increasing while the government has been cutting higher-education fund-ing by up to 35 per cent over 2010 and 2011.”

International focus has shifted in recent days to the ailing economy in Italy, where universities are facing severe cuts of 14 per cent over the next two years, according to the report. “The situation appears critical as some 25 universities already face a default risk in the near future,” the report says.

Each of the countries that has made what the report described as ‘major cuts’ in higher-education spending has faced

“It is hard to oblige people to pay it back if they don’t want to,” said Ian Whitman, author of an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report on the Becas Chile programme. “They want them to come home but come home to what? Research institutes without a test tube or a microscope? In the case of Chile, we recommended that they use some of their money to improve the infra-structure of their research sector.”

Another issue is foreign-language profi-ciency. More than half of those winning the

first scholarships from the Becas Chile pro-gramme needed to take language lessons before going abroad. And Neddermeyer acknowledged that Brazil must invest in tuition because not enough students are fluent in languages other than Portuguese.

“It is clear this could be a difficulty in longer term,” she said. “I think we have a group ready right now, but when we extend ourselves, I think we will need to have extensive courses. That can also be negotiated with the foreign universities. Some will offer that as part of their deal.”

For now, the main challenge is spread-ing the word and ramping up interest with universities and students. It’s not hard once that initial skepticism wears off, said Pires. Especially with such unprecedented numbers at hand.



increasing financial pressure as the summer has progressed, amid fears of economic contagion spreading across Europe and growing speculation about which economies might be next in line for a costly bailout. Governments won’t make decisions about budgets for several months, so exactly how the latest turmoil will hit higher education won’t be known for some time. However, there can be little doubt that universities will eventually feel the impact.

France has been a bright spot, singled out by the European University Association for its government’s ambitious stimulus package for higher education. The report noted that “the pros-pect for 2011 remains positive,” with an additional projected increase of 4.7 bn or $6.7 bn. But with rumours swirling of a potential downgrade of France’s credit rating, following Stan-dard & Poor’s reduction of the US rating, and with the French government seeking ways to trim its public deficit, universities in France could see a change in their fortunes.

Despite the uncertainty, some education experts are hopeful that universities will be able to ride out the economic upheaval largely unscathed.

“No one enjoys turmoil in the markets, “Joanna Motion, Vice President for International Operations at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, wrote in an email. The organisation helps institutions with their fund raising. “But

universities, by definition, are focussed on big issues,” she said. “They’re here for the long haul.”

As universities rely more on philanthropic giving to replace public financing, they have reason to remain optimistic that donations will continue to flow in, she said in an email. “Uni-versity campaigns these days are driven by transformational, high-end gifts. Money of that kind is genuinely global and fluid — and to some extent finds shelter from the storm.”


France has been a bright spot...for its government’s ambitious stimulus package

V I E W S , R E V I E W S & M O R E

NEW RElEaSES fOR yOuR BOOKSHElf


JaMES E Côté

“It’s the credential of a university degree and not the content that matters”

Rooting for Liberal ArtsThe book talks about the issues confronting higher education today and suggests solutions to restore liberal arts

the New Digital Shoreline: How Web 2.0 and Millennials are Revolutionising Higher Education The advent of Web 2.0 and the invasion of tech-savvy millennials on campus define

Roger McHaney’s The New Digital Shoreline. The author says that adapting to Web 2.0 is crucial for higher education today. Author: Roger McHaneyPublisher: Stylus PublishingPrice: $29.95

university Rankings: theoretical Basis, Methodology and Impacts on Global Higher Education The first comprehensive analysis of ranking surveys, the book says that policy makers and institutional leaders misuse university rankings.Authors: Jung Cheol Shin, Robert K Toutkoushian, Ulrich TeichlerPublisher: Springer Price: $139

or tie-ups with corporations for this. They advise the universities to look back and see if these steps have led to deterioration in their important academic values. The authors link this corporati-sation with the wide array of issues facing higher education: lowered standards, inflated grades and the fall of humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences instruction. According to the authors, this corporate model treats students like customers, who expect services for the fees they pay — good grades for little effort — thereby cre-ating a culture of academic disengagement among the students and the faculty. Besides these, the book also offers potential suggestions to breathe new life into liberal education.

Liberal education, the authors say, can be restored by considering the university as a place where politics finds no place; maintaining stan-dards and by doing away with the notion that the university is a place to get job training.

According to the authors, if things do not change, most of the colleges and universities will pretend to teach students at a higher level, with students pretending to learn at that level. In real-ity though, universities will simply provide empty degrees that are little more than expensive ‘fishing licenses’ for the lower-level white-collar jobs and result in a terrifying situation for higher education and society.

autHOR: James E Côté and Anton L AllaharPuBlISHER: University of Toronto PressPRICE: $24.95

lOWERING HIGHER EDuCatION: The Rise Of Corporate Universities And The Fall Of Liberal Education is an in-depth and controversial analysis of the issues confronting higher education today. The book reveals what happens to liberal arts and science education when universities sell them in the form of job training to the students.

This book is a follow-up to the authors’ 2007 book, Ivory Tower Blues. It explores the subverted ‘idea of the university’ and the forces that have set adrift the mission of these institutions. It also tells why the universities across the world are not teaching liberal arts and what implications this will have on students, professors and society in the future. With selected examples from around the world and schemes for betterment, the authors have made a breakthrough with Lowering Higher Education.

The authors say that the universities are under tremendous pressure to dig up new revenue sources for themselves and often apply business ideas

63February 2011 EduTEch

tIMEOuttIMEOut

GaDGEtS


tECH INSIDER | Mala Bhargava

astroClip – your iPhone Clip for astrophotography

If you want to shoot the moon, star constellations or a new comet, here’s a simple solution: the AstroClip. It allows you to mount your iPhone 4 to any telescope with a 1.25-inch eyepiece. Its three adjustable screws protect your phone once it is snapped into the moulded case. Add a new dimension to astrophotography with your imagination.PRICE: $15,000

WHEN tHE Apple iPad was first launched in 2010, it promised to revolutionise the ailing news industry. I’m afraid I was among the sceptical as I just didn’t think that format was the only problem that newspapers had.

But I was wrong. The iPad has done something magical to reading newspapers and magazines, and although this may not translate into comfortable sums of money in the coffers for news organisations, it has certainly brought up media consumption to never-before levels. You could even say that news reading is one

powerful reason to buy an iPad.

Every publication worth its salt has a tablet-optimised news app today. With the Times of India app, for example, you can see a clean round up of the day’s

stories with a whole strip of mini videos running along the bottom of the screen. With the NDTV news app, you can pick any channel to watch live – as long as you have a good internet connection or 3G. But the real magic is with news apps that make magic out of the way content looks.

There are a bunch of news apps, each of them offering you a different nuanced approach to news reading. I have nothing less than 12 of them on my iPad – and I use them all, depending on how I want my news at that particular moment. Flipboard, one of the first apps, to make an appearance and a definer of all subsequent apps, auto-formats news from many sources, including your own Twitter and Facebook feeds, and presents them in a beautiful flappable set of pages. This is wonderful for leisurely reading and feasting on photos. Pulse, also an early app, organises news source-wise, letting you get into each story to read in nice big print, also flappable like a book. News 360 is fantastic for researchers and writers as it gives you news items as covered by the huge number of sources. If I were to describe news apps in one word, it would have to be – revolution.

New Ways of News

Sony DSC-tX55 Digital Camera: Slim and Stylish

SONy has recently made a new addition to its Cyber-shot series of digital cameras – the Cyber-shot DSC-TX55, a high-end, 16-megapixel camera with several striking features. The camera can capture both 16MP pictures and 1080i/60 video. Moreover, it can also take 12MP photos while taking a 1080i/60 video. PRICE: $350

Mala Bhargava is Editorial Director at 9.9 Media and a technology writer. She is also the author of That’s IT, a regular column on personal computers in Business World.

PersPective


Quality education is costly

in almost all the reputed research led private universities in the Us, despite high tuition fees, UG education is subsidised

Establishing a research-led institution is expensive and leads to a high fee structure. But India needs more of them. Perhaps, subsidies can do the trick?

Higher education institutions can be broadly divided into two groups – those which are research-led but also provide

teaching and those which are teaching-led but also engage in some research. Interestingly, the best institutions for education, particularly for rapidly evolving disciplines, are actually the research-led universities, simply because the best faculty prefers to work in them. For example, the best places for education in areas like science and engineering are the top research-led universities – MIT, CalTech, Berkeley, Illinois, Princeton, Cornell, etc., in US; Cambridge, Oxford, City University in UK: and IITs, IISc, etc., in India.

In India, there are about 3,000 teach-ing-led institutions, as all of our colleges and many of our universities as well, are in this category. We have less than 50 institutions that are genuinely research-led. Clearly, the challenge in higher edu-cation today is to build good quality research-led institutions.

Unfortunately, in our country there is a lack of appreciation about the costs involved in setting up a research-led institution. This may be due to the large number of teaching-led colleges where the costs are significantly lower. In a research-led institute, about two-thirds of the students are undergraduates ( U G s ) a n d t h e r e m a i n i n g a r e postgraduates (PGs). The UG students are the primary source of fee revenue, as PhD students and many of the Masters

students are generally treated as useful resources for the institute and are paid some stipends/fellowships. This pattern holds globally as well as in India.

The running cost for an institute can be approximated through the faculty strength. For each faculty member in such an institute we should have a few Masters students and a couple of PhD students, and one to two staff members. Given that the faculty in such institutes, who are doctorates, will necessarily be paid well, the salary bill will translate to over 30 lakh per faculty members per year. Add to this the non-manpower costs for running an institute including travel, maintenance, electricity, etc: the total cost will be around 40 lakh per member per year (assuming there are no major and expensive research facilities). Such an institute can have about 12:1 UG student to faculty ratio. This means that, for running such an institute, the

total cost will be about 40 lakh for each 12 UG students. In other words, the fee will translate to around 3.5 lakh per UG student, just for running the institute.

Add to it the cost of infrastructure and facilities: the capital cost of building a decent campus with good research facili-ties is at least 20 lakh per UG student – this includes hostels, classrooms, labs, recreation facilities, etc., as well as R&D spaces, faculty offices, cubicles for PG students, and accommodation. If this capital is to be recovered from the UG fees, then it will add approx 2 lakh per year per student. This estimate is exclud-ing the cost of land, which when added would escalate the total cost.

In almost all the reputed research-led private universities in the US (e.g. MIT, Cornell, Princeton), despite high tuition fees (of the order of $30,000 per year) UG education is subsidised. They provide these subsidies, which can be to the tune of $20,000 per student per year, through their endowments, government grants, and other resources.

Quality education provided by reputed research-led institutions will be expensive. And, we need many such institutions. A key challenge is to find viable methods of subsidy and strike a balance with fees, so that such institutions can be created and sustained. (The views are personal.)

To read an extended version of this article, please log on to www.edu-leaders.com

Pankaj jalotePankaj Jalote is Director, IIIT Delhi & Professor, IIT Delhi

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For sales & queries contact: NORTH / East: M P Singh, Ph.: +91-9717007378, E-mail: [email protected] WEST: Vijay Rangarajan,Ph.:+91-9987787513, E-mail: [email protected], Varun Agrawal, Ph.: +91-7738355732, E-mail: [email protected]: Devesh Divakaran, Ph.: +91-9986717514, E-mail: [email protected]

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www.panasonic.co.in

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1600 lm Full HD Contrast 100,000:1

MAHENG/2010/34560

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The Pursuit of Prestige