“A truly global university.” Sounds like a tagline from a brochure. In fact, it’s an approving comment from a student on the number of international faculty members—18 and counting—at Sharda University, hardly a year and a half into the business of education. When it comes to building up an image in the degree marketplace coming up in India, having an international faculty seems to pay. No wonder Sharda University isn’t the only private institution acquiring “global” status by hiring foreigners on the faculty. Many others are also hiring full-time faculty from the US, the UK, Russia, Finland, Turkey, France and Greece.
They aren’t shy to advertise the fact. A TV commercial for Sharda University has soundbites from its international faculty, underscoring the “global exposure” it provides. Its print ad, too, highlights a “20 per cent foreign faculty”. The website of Lovely Professional University highlights its division of international affairs. Noida International University, although still a work in progress, boasts on its website of an “internationally renowned faculty”. One management professor is blunt: he calls this game the “glamour makeover”, designed to draw high tuition fees from students.
Victor Gambhir, pro vice-chancellor of Manav Rachna International University, Faridabad, wouldn’t put it that way. He is keen to hire more foreigners—which is proving a magic mantra in establishing some credentials for newborn institutions with the long journey to academic excellence still ahead. Manav Rachna University’s first foreign staffer—Julya Doktor from Russia, who responded to an online ad for the job—joined a month ago as assistant professor of foreign languages and protocol manager. “Enrolment in our German class has gone up threefold after she came,” says Gambhir.
Foreign faculty members at Lovely universities. (Photograph by Prabhjot Singh Gill)
There seems to be more at work, however, than just a glossy image fuelling enrolment. At Lovely Professional University, Jalandhar, which has eight foreign faculty members (up from two a couple of years ago) and a target of 20, deputy director Aman Mittal stresses the value of having an international panel in engineering, management, biotech, operations and marketing. “Many mncs say they need human resource that can work with foreign clients,” he explains. “Faculty members with versatile examples and teaching styles enable students to think beyond India.”
Jagmohan Bhanver, CEO of the Indian Institute of Financial Management, with campuses in Ahmedabad and Mumbai, extols the virtues of cross-cultural exposure—which he says is the institute’s litmus test while selecting foreign faculty—besides domain expertise and an ability to translate concepts into reality.
What some institutions tend to gloss over, however, is that these international academicians face challenges in an unfamiliar milieu, and, as some foreign faculty themselves admit, in transferring knowledge gained in a very different context. Eric Saranovitz, associate dean for academics and research at the School of Convergence, Delhi, who came to India last year after having taught at New York University and Denison University, says, “I teach media and culture and cite examples from the American context, all of which I am not necessarily able to explain. Similarly, I don’t always understand what the students are talking about. So it is a mutual learning process.”
It’s all about “training one’s ear”, says Sari Mattila from Finland, a management teacher at Nirma University, Gandhinagar, since January. She admits she is still learning the ropes of the Indian system. For Peter Michael Waugh from the UK, who aims to set up a silicon photonics lab at Sharda, “throwing my voice properly in class and making myself intelligible, given my different accent”, has meant a challenging first five weeks. He says getting people to trust you is difficult if you are a foreigner.
On the other hand, his colleague Mansi El Mansi says students relate better to foreign professors. Into his second year as professor of biotechnology at the university, Mansi, who has taught in the UK for 27 years, observes, “A student may hesitate to approach an Indian professor with his or her problems for cultural reasons, including caste issues. None of that exists in the case of a foreign professor.”
P.K. Gupta, chancellor of Sharda University, stacks up more positives, contending that foreign faculty often does better than Indian professors. “They set a benchmark in professionalism, ensuring that even the student in the last row understands what is taught. The average Indian faculty member does not bother to do that. Besides, a professor from abroad has a pedagogy that is interactive, application-oriented and spontaneous,” he says. “When even the iits and iims are facing a shortage of good Indian teachers, where will we get them from?”
No wonder then, that while paying international staff, institutions are willing to dig deep into their pockets. Gupta says the annual pay for a foreign staffer ranges between Rs 22-45 lakh, against Rs 5 lakh upwards for Indians. Bhanver says typically, foreign faculty members are paid twice or thrice what their Indian counterparts get on account of the higher cost of living in their home countries.
Not surprisingly, the argument does not cut ice with Indian academicians. Debabrata Das, a professor at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, says, “It is not justified. When we go abroad to teach, there is no disparity in salary in foreign institutions.” Deploring an “Indian mindset biased in favour of foreigners”, Das says economic hardship has brought many foreigners here. “As soon as the economy in their countries improves, they will go back,” he says. “Academic institutions need long-term commitments to build courses, labs and foster R&D.”
Meanwhile, Sunil Kumar, additional secretary, department of higher education, seems to ask for a degree of discrimination while hiring foreigners. “As long as we meet the demand or shortfall with high quality faculty of unimpeachable credentials, there should be no concern. But if that is not the case, then we could have trouble. Also, it would make little sense to engage ‘foreign’ faculty, where qualified resident Indian faculty is easier to engage.” That such concerns are not unfounded is evident from Bhanver’s observation that some institutions, in their haste to portray a global picture, are bringing in junior faculty members with teaching experience of only 2-6 years. If there are lessons to be learnt in the race to be truly international, the time starts now.
