Yale President’s thought on Innovation Universities in India
November 9th, 2010
Following is an excerpt from a interview in http://chronicle.com/article/Yales-President-Talks-About/125273/.
Q. By "innovation," what do you mean? Could you give me some examples?
A. The biggest one is this: If India is going to build some truly high-quality institutions, it is going to have competitive compensation on a global scale. One of the things the Chinese have done, … they have essentially decided to break their salary scales to recruit back Chinese expats working in the U.S. and U.K. to be leaders and senior professors at their top institutions. And India has an extraordinary expat academic population. But it is very hard to get those people back in the public universities [here], because they are not attractive-enough jobs. So "innovation universities" offer hope that they’ll be able to provide competitive compensation and merit-based compensation.
Q. Did you talk with Kapil Sibal, India’s minister in charge of higher education, about this?
A. Yes, with the minister and many other people here. … The whole point of innovation universities is that both public and private innovation universities in the legislation [to allow for their creation] will have the possibility of not paying [faculty salaries] according to the standard scale.
Q. Why is that issue here in India important to you at Yale?
A. If the question posed to us is, Help us build world-class institutions, my first piece of advice is you can’t do it and pay people 20 percent of what they earn in the U.S. [He laughs.]
The last point is a very important one. While there are many top world class researchers in India, who are only paid 20% of what they would earn in the US, it is not possible to have a university full of such top (in terms of research) faculty by paying them only 20%; let alone have 14 such universities.
That is why there is a need of deep pocketed private benefactors of such universities.
Entry Filed under: Bhubaneswar-Cuttack-Puri- Khurda area (1),Universities of Innovation,University of Innovation Bhubaneswar
1 Writeup
1. ashburn | November 9th, 2010 at 1:04 pm
” there is no need to increase their salaries by 50 times to ensure this. But their lives could be made easier by providing schools, making sure that power condition and commuting is reasonably all right”
this was the quote by narayan murthy when asked about wooing back indian talent settled abroad. i kind of agree with him, i mean small incentives will go a long way in bringing back the expats. on another note i am curious to know if it will focus on all disciplines or like the “great” iits only on engineering