'Joint ventures yes, but no campus in India'

Q&A: RUTH J SIMMONS, President, Brown University

Brown University, like some of its Ivy League peers, does not plan to set up a campus in India. Instead, it plans to strengthen its alliances with institutions and the industry here. Ruth J Simmons, President of Brown University, told Kirtika Suneja the reasons for these premier institutions’ unwillingness to set up campuses in India despite the opening up of the higher education space here. Edited excerpts:

What does the foreign education Bill getting a Cabinet nod mean for Brown? Does it mean an India campus?
We have no immediate plans of setting up a campus in India. So, the Bill getting a clearance is not of any use to us. However, our willingness to collaborate in India is significant and we plan to do so by getting more involved with Indian education. We would like to have more cooperative agreements through faculty and student exchange programmes and joint research, courses, internships and joint ventures in short programmes.

 

Your trip has coincided with this historic decision though…
The purpose of my trip was to start an India Advisory Council that would comprise the alumni of Brown-almost 500 of them — who are in India and will design a mechanism for the university for its ongoing work on a consistent basis. We seek additional partnerships in India. Our relationship with St Stephen’s College has been successful and we are now expanding it by sending more students there besides broadening the faculty’s research programmes. I also visited the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay to have a partnership on an institution by institution basis.

So is it that Ivy League institutions like Brown and Yale are shying away from India?
I don’t know about the others but for an Ivy League university, their reputation and brand is important. First, we don’t want to setup anything that is a weaker version of what exists in the US. Second, you can’t replicate what you have at home by setting up a campus in another location because the faculty’s teachings and offerings are different from those in the main campus. Also, countries have not been very happy with the results of the campuses of other countries. Moreover, at Brown, we don’t have the capacity to transfer our faculty to India or to recruit similar faculty here. The student faculty ratio is 9:1 and we will not like it if it goes up in India. We don’t have branch campuses anywhere in the world.

Yale and MIT will mentor the upcoming ‘Innovation Universities’ in India. Does Brown has similar plans?
I met the Minister for HRD Kapil Sibal, and his ideas about innovation are very interesting and inspiring. We offered our assistance to him on what is deemed appropriate. We have an entrepreneurship approach to education and we are an interdisciplinary varsity. Our strength is liberal arts and that is of interest here. We stand ready for any assistance by collaborating with individual institutes.

How is Brown celebrating its ‘Year of India’ initiative?
Through this initiative, we plan to bring more attention to India on our campus as India has a vast potential and is enormously diverse. We have been holding seminars and exhibitions for students to study, understand and travel to India. We will follow this up with more faculty appointments and a Centre of Research on India at Brown’s campus depending on the fund raising we can do. We have allocated some university resources to increase the content on India in the curriculum so as to provide more visibility to India on our campus. The research centre will be a common place for conversations and it will centralise all discussions on India. As part of the initiative, we also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Confederation of Indian Industry so as to have a better understanding of the Indian industry. Brown will send its students especially those in the engineering and maths schools to work with companies here for innovation.

What about the number of Indian students at Brown?
We want more Indian students to come to Brown at both the undergraduate and graduate level. So, we are improving the financial aid for students from all economic classes by raising funds to admit students irrespective of their socio-economic background. The number of undergraduate applications has grown from 106 to 195 over the past ten years. We offered admission to 20 applicants from India last year.

For the past several years, the number of students admitted annually has been roughly twice that of the early part of the decade. Financial aid for Indian students has doubled during that period and we expect scholarships for Indians students to continue to increase over the coming years. Also, we have 48 graduate students from India. The primary fields for Indian graduate students are computer science, engineering and physics. We expect that these students will return to India in faculty and research roles- both important to expand the higher education system in India.