Stanford Daily on Vedanta University
Stanford Daily has an article on Vedanta university with the title "Indian College to be modeled after Stanford." It talks about the vision behind Vedanta University and asks Indian students in Stanford if they would prefer Vedanta University over Stanford. Most students say they would prefer Stanford; this is understandable as Vedanta University does not exist yet. Here is an excerpt from that article:
Revti Gupta ‘09 was impressed by Vedanta’s high expectations.
“It is high time someone took action to establish a world class institute in India that is not just IIT and IIM,” she said, referring to the top technology and management schools in the South Asian country, home to nearly one-sixth of the world’s people.
However, like Mehra and Forbes, Gupta said she would still prefer to travel to California to study.
“I would still come to Stanford because it provides a new perspective and an immersion in a cultural experience for me that I would not have been exposed to in India.”
Despite the lack of enthusiasm from students, Linda Hess, co-director of the Center for South Asia at Stanford, emphasized the positive impact of the initiative in the long-run.
“While Indian students who are at Stanford today may not be tempted to go to a university that’s ‘like Stanford’ in India,” she said in an email to The Daily, “the creation of a place like Vedanta University is part of a much bigger picture — the picture called ‘globalization.’
“The assumptions that used to be made about the sources of economic and intellectual power, about who is ‘ahead’ and who is ‘behind,’ are being turned around,” Hess added. “If the vision of its founders is realized, Vedanta University will attract top students from across the globe to India for the same reasons that Stanford is able to do that now.”.
October 24th, 2007