When Anjani Jain took charge as senior associate dean at Ivy League’s Yale School of Management (SOM) earlier this month, he joined the ranks of those Indian-origin professors who are heading prestigious American business schools or are at senior positions there.
While Nitin Nohria heads the Harvard Business School and Soumitra Dutta is the dean of Cornell University’s management school, Dipak C Jain is the dean of INSEAD. Jain was a kind of pioneer when he became the dean of the prestigious Kellogg School of Management in 2001.
In fact, the last few years have seen a spurt in the number of Indian-origin professors heading such prestigious American B-schools ? a trend which paints a positive picture of brand India, besides benefitting these institutes.
“India is a big market and one way of attracting Indian students is to have Indian faculty in these institutes. This also helps them devise India-based programmes. Moreover, Indians have been the richest contributors to research abroad,? said Shalini S Sharma, head, higher education, Confederation of Indian Industry.
Experts opine that with government funding to these institutes having dried up in the wake of uncertain economic conditions, they need new and emerging markets like India and China to raise revenues.
Indian business houses like Mahindras and Tatas, along with former Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, have made generous contributions to the Ivy League institutes like Yale and Harvard. While the Tata Group donated $50 million to Harvard Business School, Nilekani gave $5 million to Yale University for its India initiative some time back.
“Though these institutes don’t want an India campus, but they have a considerable presence here through various programmes and want to attract relationships, which is not restricted to students only,? added Deepak Chandra, deputy dean at the Indian School of Business.
Though these academicians were a part of the brain drain that happened in the country in the 1980s, it is their contribution to research in science, mathematics and economics that this progression to top levels has happened.
For instance, dean of University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business Sunil Kumar?s research includes performance evaluation and control of manufacturing systems, service operations, and communications networks. On the other hand, Jain who is an IIM Ahmedabad gradute has analysis and design of manufacturing systems, optimisation algorithms, and probabilistic analysis of combinatorial problems as his research interests. He joined?the faculty of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania?in 1986 and served for 26 years before joining Yale SOM.
“This is so because most of them are from the IITs, which churn out the best people, post which they complete their Masters abroad and enter academics,? noted Gulia, senior manager at consulting firm Ernst & Young.
