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February 11, 2013

For U.S. Colleges in India, Great Possibilities, Thwarted Hopes

Sami Siva/Redux

An arts class is under way at Maharaja Sayajirao U. of Baroda, in Gujarat. Officials there wish Americans were interested

in academic exchanges rather than research.

By Karin Fischer

Ahmadabad, India

American colleges have to be in India.

After all, no other country in this century, save China, is likely to be as important geopolitically,

financially, demographically, culturally. Globally savvy students ought to study here. There are

research opportunities for political scientists and publichealth specialists, economists and

ethnomusicologists. And, simply put, India, where half of the 1.2billionandgrowing population

is under 30, needs help—building enough universities, wiring enough classrooms, training

enough teachers.

"It is a place of such great promise," says John E. Dooley, who formerly led Virginia Tech's

international efforts, "that you just have to find a way to engage."

So if collaborating with India is a nobrainer, why are

many American colleges finding it a nonstarter? Too

often, ambitious plans are scaled back. Agreements

languish in drawers, their signatures yellowing.

Relationships begun with optimism and promise

dissolve in frustration and mistrust. Some college

officials, faced with thousands of potential Indian

partners, don't even know where to begin.

Take Timothy Doupnik, vice provost for international

programs at the University of South Carolina at

Columbia. When Mr. Doupnik accepted the job, the

university's president, noting how many South Carolina

professors worked in China, asked: What about India?

"I can take a hint," deadpanned Mr. Doupnik. So in

December, he came to this western Indian city, close to

the Pakistan border, on an exploratory mission.

In four days, he visited seven universities across the

state of Gujarat. He drank vats of tea. He collected

Enlarge Image

Sami Siva/Redux

Chief Minister Narendra Modi of Gujarat

(center) oversaw a conference with

more than 100 institutions represented

last month. Gujarat has aggressively

pursued foreign partnerships, but it still

struggles to create robust jointresearch

efforts and faculty exchanges.

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fistfuls of business cards. He shook many hands. And in

the end, says Mr. Doupnik, "We might have hit a few

singles, maybe. But there were no home runs."

What happened? For one, South Carolina hoped to

recruit students into its graduate programs, but Mr.

Doupnik did not realize, until he got to Ahmadabad,

that undergraduates in India are generally taught at

separate colleges affiliated with larger universities; he

had not arranged to visit any colleges. He was seeking

partners for South Carolina's engineering program, but

Gujarat's government had consolidated all engineering

schools into a single institution, and it, too, wasn't on

his schedule. None of the campuses he toured had

experience hosting international students—not

Westerners, anyway. "I couldn't send our students to

study there," Mr. Doupnik said, after seeing the

facilities. At one institution, he was ushered into a

conference room with some 30 department chairmen in

attendance. By the time each had completed a five

minute presentation, Mr. Doupnik's head was spinning.

Back in South Carolina, he passed along some leads for joint research to a few deans. But he

couldn't, as he had once envisioned, recommend sending a delegation of faculty members and

senior administrators to Gujarat to explore deeper ties. Figuring out a strategy would take more

time. A colleague offered Mr. Doupnik a bit of consolation: Even very experienced international

officers get tripped up in India.

It's a headscratcher. India, in so many ways, seems like a natural fit for American colleges. Like

the United States, it's a freemarket democracy with a diverse populace. It's Englishspeaking.

More than 100,000 Indian students, most at the graduate level, now study in the United States,

second just to China, and the faculty ranks of American universities are chockablock with

Indianborn professors. What's more, American involvement in higher education on the

subcontinent dates back decades, to the early days of Indian independence, when American

universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon helped start

some of India's best, among them the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology.

China, by contrast, is controlled, centralized, and, at least nominally, Communist. It was off

limits to Western universities until the 1980s; before that, Chinese universities were shuttered

for a decade during the Cultural Revolution. Today's flood of Chinese students to the West was

but a trickle several years ago, and few of those students retained ties home.

Yet China is far ahead of India in international engagement. It sends nearly double the number of

students to the United States and plays host to more than three times as many Americans than

does India. It boasts collaborative research projects and jointdegree programs and robust

faculty exchanges. There are centers for China study on campuses across the United States.

Prominent American institutions, like Duke University and New York University, are setting up

branches in China—something that the government in India has never OK'd.

Money is a factor, of course. But what really holds American and Indian universities back,

despite goodwill and good intentions, are missteps and misunderstandings. Cultural

misperceptions. A mismatch of interests.

"There are a lot of instances," says Rahul Choudaha, director of research and advisory services

at World Education Services, a nonprofit group that specializes in evaluating foreign credentials

and trends, "of institutions getting their fingers burned."

Bound by Bureaucracy

This fall, Virginia Tech held a groundbreaking ceremony on a plot of land near Chennai, an

industrial hub on India's southeast coast.

The event was a long time coming: The university first set its sights on India nearly a decade ago,

calling it a keystone of its global ambitions. Under those plans, Virginia TechChennai would

have offered graduate degrees in muchindemand fields like engineering and business.

But no classes will be held in the stateoftheart building now under construction. Instead the

6,000squarefoot facility will serve solely as a research center, bringing professors and

graduate students from the United States and India together with local industry. It is expected to

open this spring.

Even as the university moves ahead with its research efforts, Guru Ghosh, associate vice

president for international affairs, says Virginia Tech "still wants to be one of the first foreign

universities to offer degrees in India."

nathan g for the chronicle

Virginia Tech had planned a branch

campus on land near Chennai, but with

recognition of foreign degrees

uncertain, those plans are on ice.

Enlarge Image

Sami Siva / Redux

The deputy head of the international

office at Maharaja Sayajirao U. of

Baroda speaks with students from Sri

Lanka and Malaysia. The government of

the businessminded state of Gujarat

has made improving its universities a

priority.

The Global Newsletter Free newsletter. A convenient weekly summary of The Chronicle s coverage of highereducation news from around the world, with links to the Worldwise blog and international commentary.

Past Coverage

Terrorism Is Unlikely to Keep U.S. Colleges Away From India December 2, 2008

Terrorism Is Unlikely to Keep U.S. Colleges Away From India December 2, 2008

News Analysis: What Changes in India Could Mean for U.S. Colleges June 17, 2009

Cornell Receives $50Million Gift for International Research and Recruitment October 24, 2008

News Analysis: What Recent Moves in India Could Mean for American Higher Education June 17, 2009

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The University of Roehampton, London provides a highquality learning experience in a friendly and supportive

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When that will be, however, is anyone's guess. Although some 630 foreign universities were

operating in India as of 2010, according to the Association of Indian Universities, they do so

without any legislative authority, making it all but impossible for graduates to get jobs in the

public sector or enroll in Indian graduate programs. A bill giving outside universities the right to

set up campuses and offer degrees on Indian soil has been bottled up in Parliament for years. At

work is a combination of forces, including a resistance to foreign providers of any stripe—global

retailers like WalMart have faced similar legal roadblocks to entering the Indian market.

The limbo has had an impact, and not just on Virginia Tech. Georgia Tech, too, has downgraded

its aspirations in India. Rather than establishing an Indian outpost, the university is opting to

focus on joint research projects while looking into onlinedegree programs. Setting up a full

fledged campus will wait for legislation, says Vijay K. Madisetti, an engineering professor who

leads Georgia Tech's India effort.

Regulatory uncertainty was one factor in Champlain College's decision to wind down its Mumbai

campus, where it offered degrees and sponsored studyabroad students from its home campus, in

Vermont. And Parliament's indecision has kept other institutions, like Indiana's Valparaiso

University, on the sidelines, hesitant to move ahead with plans that might be scuttled.

"A lot of universities are in a holding pattern," says Adrian Mutton, chief executive of Sannam

S4, a company that advises foreign institutions on their India strategy. "They're waiting for

landing gear to bring them down."

Even if the bill does eventually pass, it could impose conditions so onerous—limiting the number

of foreign faculty or prohibiting revenues from leaving the country—that few institutions may be

willing to meet them.

In that sense, the foreignuniversity measure is really a highprofile illustration of why it can be

so difficult for universities to do business in India: namely, its oftensuffocating bureaucracy.

While few institutions are willing to risk reputation and resources to set up an overseas campus,

red tape can hinder even the most basic international work. Rules restrict faculty travel abroad.

A highly regimented credit system at many universities prevents students from taking courses

outside of their fields and makes it difficult for foreignexchange students to transfer credits

back home. Forget medical research—the sharing of biological materials, like blood or tissue

samples, is prohibited. Getting approval for a single new course, never mind a jointdegree

program, can take months or years.

India's private universities, which have proliferated in the last decade or so, are less constrained

by regulations, but they differ widely in quality and are not as well known abroad.

Further complicating matters are state regulations that can contradict or compound national

ones (as in the United States, states have direct oversight of public universities). Several Indian

states are moving to pass legislation that would permit branch campuses, even if the federal

government restricts them.

Says William B. Lacy, vice provost for university outreach and international programs at the

University of California at Davis, "India inherited the worst of British bureaucracy."

International Baggage

Of course, foreign partners bring their own baggage. Just ask Yogesh Singh.

Mr. Singh likes the visitors, welcomes them—the university delegations from Florida, Virginia,

and New Mexico; Britain, Germany, and Canada. In fact, it was his idea to set up the first

international office at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda shortly after he became vice

chancellor, 18 months ago.

It's just that Mr. Singh can't help wishing that his overseas guests had a somewhat different

agenda. "Joint research," he says, with the tiniest edge of exasperation. "That's what everyone

talks about."

To Mr. Singh, the trouble with research is that it has limited impact. It touches the researcher, a

collaborator or two, a few graduate assistants. Academic exchanges, he argues, sending

professors abroad to teach and bringing in foreign faculty to share new pedagogy, have more far

reaching consequences because they change what goes on in the classroom. They have an

institutional effect, particularly among younger faculty.

"Our students will be exposed to fresh and different air," Mr. Singh says.

"After the teaching," he adds, "research will come."

Actually, faculty members at the Gujarati institution are already engaged in plenty of

international research. Sarita Gupta, head of the biochemistry department, has even turned

research connections into a visitingscientist program, which brings in guest lecturers for a week

at a time to give talks and to work alongside Ph.D. students. It has attracted professors from the

University of Tennessee, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Laval University, in

Quebec. Some of Ms. Gupta's students have later spent time doing research in the visitors' labs.

But that makes MSUBaroda, its graceful towers and vaulted domes giving the campus an air of

worn majesty, somewhat unusual. Relatively little research is done at Indian universities; instead

it is spun off into separate institutes and centers. At most universities, teaching is faculty

members' main focus; if professors do research, it's a passion project.

That's in sharp contrast to major universities in America, where research is king. Indeed, notes

Philip G. Altbach, director of the Center of International Higher Education at Boston College, a

disproportionate share of the American institutions that are most active overseas are research

intensive universities. But a country in which only a handful of institutions conduct much

research at all, and just one ranks among the world's top 500 research universities (China, by

comparison, has 28), offers few obvious partners.

For many Indian university leaders, focusing on research is an unimagined luxury when they

have such pressing needs in the classroom.

"There aren't enough seats, there aren't enough universities," says Duleep C. Deosthale, vice

president for international education at Manipal Education, a private education provider.

"There's always not enough."

The scope is staggering: Just 20 percent of 18 to 24yearolds get any kind of postsecondary

schooling.

At the same time, observers worry that instruction in the current system is inadequate. Courses

of study are narrow and rigid. Syllabi are antiquated, and professors teach by rote. Employers

complain that the graduates they get aren't up to the jobs.

"Our faculty need to learn to teach differently," says P.J. Lavakare, a former executive director

of the U.S. Educational Foundation in India.

But transforming academic culture isn't easy, and few institutions have resources for faculty

development. A number of American universities have reached out to assist: Yale is training

university administrators. Rutgers has teamed up with an Indian partner, the Tata Institute for

Social Sciences, to start a center dedicated to best practices in India's underdeveloped

vocationaleducation sector. Building on its long history in joint agricultural research, Cornell is

aiding two Indian institutions in creating degree programs in the field, with plans to exchange

students and professors. Such collaborations, however, remain relatively small in number and

narrow in scope, making little dent in India's yawning demand.

John L. Wood, senior associate vice president for international education at the University at

Buffalo, says he's keenly aware of the need for better training and has encouraged partner

institutions in India to send doctoral students or young faculty members to the State University

of New York campus. But frequently the expense is too great. And there's another problem, he

says: Sometimes they don't want to go home.

Selling the Faculty

The trouble is compounded by the fact that getting American faculty members to go to India can

be a tough sell. For the kind of overseas partnerships needed in India, faculty indifference can be

a dealbreaker. After all, academic exchanges and professional mentoring rise and fall on faculty

commitment.

Take Rollins College, in central Florida. It is a small, liberalarts college dedicated to teaching,

with an ambition to go global and a history of sending faculty members abroad. Oh, yeah, and it

counts one of India's most famous public figures, Rahul Gandhi, the son and grandson of

presidents, among its alumni. Sounds perfect for this work, right? Not exactly.

Rollins's foray into India has happened in fits and starts. The president, Lewis M. Duncan,

returned from a trip energized by the possibility of working in India.

So far, though, that enthusiasm hasn't reached the faculty, which has made progress slow. "The

bottleneck is faculty buyin," says Ilan Alon, an internationalbusiness professor who is leading

Rollins's effort.

For many professors, there may simply be no clear incentive for doing this kind of work—tenure

and academic reputation are, at the end of the day, heavily influenced by research and

publications, not by global engagement.

At the University of Tulsa, Cheryl Matherly, associate dean for global education, says a large

part of her work has been educating people on the campus. "We just didn't have to make the case

to engage in China," she says, "the way we have to with India."

The truth is, working in India can be demanding. Laboratories and classrooms are often spartan.

Technology can be outdated or nonexistent. Health concerns are real—a third of the Rollins

professors on an exploratory visit fell ill.

For Mr. Singh, of MSUBaroda, it's disappointing not to have attracted more visiting professors.

After all, he points out, it would be easy enough for foreign faculty members to spend a few

weeks or a month there during their summer vacations or semester breaks.

The issue, he says bluntly, is that American professors don't want to teach in India. "It's the

mindset," he says.

It might be natural, then, to turn to Indianborn faculty members. But depending on expatriates

can be chancy, says Nick Booker, who leads a Delhibased education consulting firm,

IndoGenius. After all, these professors typically left India as graduate students; their academic

careers have been in America. "They don't know Indian universities today," Mr. Booker says.

The IndiaWhisperers

Instead, some institutions have concluded that if they're truly committed to working in India,

they need a guide, some kind of local presence.

Roger N. Brindley, associate vice president for global academic programs at the University of

South Florida, works in both India and China and says that, in many ways, he finds the latter

country easier to navigate, despite the linguistic differences. "Yes, they speak Mandarin in

China," he says, "but it's in India that you need an interpreter."

For South Florida, that interpreter is Sannam S4.

The company's offices are in Nehru Place, a Delhi commercial center, in a tower that rises above

the sepia haze choking the city. Two walls of the cheerful reception area are covered with

university seals and crests, arranged in tidy rows, most from Britain.

For all intents and purposes, this is the Indian office of all these universities. About a third of

Sannam's clients are in education.

To reach the office of Mr. Mutton, the chief executive, a visitor wends around a warren of

cubbies and small glassfronted rooms, each stenciled with the name of a city, or, more precisely,

a college town. Each Sannam S4 staff member is hired by and reports to a home university.

Previously, the India "office" of many overseas universities would have been run out of an

alumnus's spare bedroom, Mr. Mutton says. Or institutions would have tried to manage such

work from afar, with officials jetting in several times a year for a meetingorama.

Behind a door marked "Tampa" is South Florida's eyes and ears on the ground in India. Mr.

Brindley hopes that having a local representative will help it avoid big mistakes and smaller

hiccups. Now, when he travels to India, the campuses he visits have been vetted by local staff to

determine their partnership potential. "Otherwise I'm on a fishing trip, aren't I?" Mr. Brindley

says. South Florida, which signed on with Sannam a year ago, is moving cautiously but is close to

signing two agreements.

With some 33,000 Indian colleges and universities, public and private, finding the right partner

is no easy task. Too often, American and Indian institutions alike default to working with brand

name universities. But the Harvards and the Indian Institutes of Technology can handle only so

many partners, and some lesserknown institutions might be a better match.

Anita Patankar, director of the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, one of the country's young

private institutions, recalls meeting an American who brusquely enumerated the reasons his

college couldn't work in India: no critical thinking, minimal class discussion, little instruction in

the humanities. "Excuse me?" Ms. Patankar said, telling the man her institution does all three.

In Gujarat, one of the state's newest institutions, Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University, also

has a school for liberal arts, along with degrees in perhaps likelier disciplines, such as engineering

and petroleum management. From its founding, six years ago, by the state oil corporation, PDPU

has emphasized applied research and international collaboration; already a number of promising

projects are under way, including joint research with institutions like Georgia Tech and a three

week summer program that sends top undergraduates to several American universities.

Indian and American universities need time to build trust, to cultivate strong, durable

relationships, says D.J. Pandian, a founder of the Gujarati university and the state's principal

secretary of energy. "It cannot be an arranged marriage."

Taking the Long View

Want a reminder of what's at stake, why universities on both sides persevere despite the

obstacles? Go for a taxi ride in Ahmadabad.

It's a gloriously sunny day, but much of this city of five and a half million is still sleeping off the

previous night's Navratri festivities, when Hindus dance until dawn in praise of the goddess

Durga. With the city's normally congested streets freeflowing, Mohinder decides to take his

passenger on an impromptu tour.

"That, ma'am, is Gujarat University. And that over there, that is CEPT University. CEPT. It is

for architecture, for the planning of cities. And IIM, Indian Institute of Management. Do you

know it? It is one of the best universities in all of India. It is excellent." Almost absentmindedly

the taxi driver points out what guidebooks would deem Ahmadabad's most notable site, the

ashram where Mahatma Gandhi and his followers led an austere existence while agitating for

Indian independence.

Mohinder has had little formal schooling. He learned English—the native tongue here is

Gujarati—by ferrying visitors to one of the city's handful of Western hotels. Yet he believes

passionately in the importance of education. Perhaps one day, he tells his customer (a "junior

businesswoman," he surmises), his two young daughters will be like the girls he sees scurrying

across the university road, thin frames bent beneath heavy backpacks. "Then they will have good

lives."

As it happens, Mohinder's confidence in education's transformative potential is echoed by some

of the most powerful people in Gujarat. The government of this thriving, businessminded state is

making improving its universities a top priority, and it's bringing in foreign universities to assist.

"We want a society propelled by the best minds," says Hasmukh Adhia, the state's principal

secretary for education. "We don't want to be a manufacturing economy that produces

something the U.S. has discovered. We want our own innovation."

A sign pinned to the wall in Mr. Adhia's office reads: "You can't build a reputation on what you're

going to do." Already the government has built a hightech center where professors and

administrators from foreign universities can work for weeks at a time. Gujarat has loosened

restrictions on faculty travel and is considering a small surcharge on land purchases to support

international joint research.

Last month Mr. Adhia and his colleagues put on a conference that brought in representatives of

more than 100 universities from the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. Part showandtell

about the state, part matchmaking session, the twoday meeting was capped by a ceremony in

which many Gujarati and foreign universities inked agreements, with the chief minister,

Narendra Modi, looking down beatifically from a flowered dais.

But Gujarat has resources, financial and otherwise, that few other Indian states, struggling to

meet basic needs, possess. And even here there are difficulties. PDPU, for example, goes begging

for faculty members who are also strong researchers; most who fit that description go abroad or

take morelucrative privatesector jobs. At MSUBaroda, there's no budget for the visiting

scientist program, so it attracts only those professors who are willing to pay their own way or

were coming to India anyway. "We can only offer good hospitality to them," Ms. Gupta, the

director, says.

For many American universities, the future may indeed include India, but they need to be

prepared for a long and difficult road. Opening Indian universities to international collaboration

will continue to be a demanding chore, and preparing Americans to work here a challenge. Mr.

Altbach, the Boston College researcher, has been working in India for half a century. Asked if he

expects more change and greater international collaboration anytime soon, he sighs. "On

balance," he says, "not a whole hell of a lot."

Click on the icons for more information on the various institutions

Big Plans Meet Reality on the Subcontinent

American colleges have big ambitions in India. But often their initial efforts hit obstacles, forcing

them to rethink their approaches. Here's some of what is—and isn't—going on in the subcontinent:

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