Some clarity on what the foreign universities are likely to do

Most top universities are unlikely to set up an Indian campus -- the list of universities that have said 'no' to this option is pretty long: Yale, Columbia, Brown, Oxford, Cambridge, ...

Here, for example, is Prof. Andrew Hamilton, Vice Chancellor of Oxford:

We have many links to India already but we have no plans...in the foreseeable future to establish a campus in India and we have no plans to offer degree courses anywhere other than Oxford for the time being.

Any particular reason?

Oh, I think there are many reasons. Oxford is an institution 800 years in the making and recreating the very special environment that sits in 700-year-old colleges and the living environment that they provide and that critical mass of scholars and students that is present in Oxford, that is a very hard thing to reproduce anywhere else.

Would it be accurate then to say 'Oxford' is not really a brand you're interested in franchising?

Universities are much more complex than talking of hamburgers and franchises.

[The last answer is brilliant, isn't it?]

I think we now have some clarity on the most likely option for foreign universities that wish to have a presence in India.

Partnerships and Collaboration.

This option offers a lot of flexibility, and could take many forms -- short term exchange programs (study tours and semester-long stays), summer internships, and / or longer programs where students do their coursework in India and do their final year projects overseas.

The Indian partner can advertise the tie-up with foreign universities; the foreign partner will have a dependable host in India to send its students to under an exchange program. The overseas partner may also manage to extract some 'earnest money' from the Indian partner -- all of which will end up increase the cost of education in these colleges and universities.

There's also a potential upside: If the partnership is broad enough to include faculty exchanges (and long term collaborative research), it will be a huge plus for India -- India will benefit from the expertise of people who have worked under many different kinds of environments.

Kai Friese: Slow Speed

Slow Speed is the title of Kai Friese's fabulous essay [link via Amit Varma]. Here's an excerpt on Indian bureaucracy:

Sidebar

Related link: Jan Banning's photo series called Bureaucratics -- there's no direct link, but click on 'photo series' and use the menu of pictures on the right to look for the set on India. [Hat tip: Jason Kottke]

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I [once wrote] a satirical essay on the dinosaurs of bureaucracy that had survived Manmohan Singh’s first wave of economic liberalization. I was quite pleased with the title-”Bureaucratic Park”-though it never saw the light of day. But the real thrill was finding myself back on very familiar turf. Grimy corridors, supplicant citizens, and the “concerned officer” enthroned on his swivel chair. I loved the scenery-the towel on the backrest, the psychedelic paperweights… the papers beneath them.

There was the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology, an Orwellian outfit that produced a Comprehensive Glossary of Administrative Terms in English and the vernacular. “Hindi is very poor in terms,” a commissioner told me. Another office nurtured the remains of Indira Gandhi’s 20-Point Program from the Emergency days. “We look after points 1, 5, 8, 11, 14, 15, and 16,” a man told me. “The other thirteen have been dropped.” My favorite was the Office of Stationery. “Please apply in writing. In triplicate,” they told me. I went to visit them instead, and found the assembled staff standing hushed and yes, stationary, at their desks. It was a moment of silence for a fallen colleague, a bureaucratic wake.

President of Brown University on why an Indian campus doesn't make sense

Prof. Ruth Simmons, President, Brown University, is quite candid in this Mint interview (with Aparna Kalra) about why "major universities will not [open campuses in India] to a very significant degree":

... [For] the most part, if you are in another country, they (the students) don’t want a second-class programme. If you come, they want a first-class programme, which means they want the same faculty that you have back home, they want the same course material, they want everything to be the same.

By and large, it is very difficult for universities to replicate what they have in their own countries. If you ask your faculty to travel back and forth, that’s pretty imperfect, often faculty don’t want to do that. You end up with faculty who are not vetted in the same way that your campus faculty is vetted.

What, then, makes sense for a foreign university with an interest in having a presence in India?

The answer is: Partnership and collaboration. Here's Prof. Simmons, again:

It is very important when you come into another country to demonstrate respect for the educational system in that country, to demonstrate equality of standards. I think for the most part, people will still want to have collaborations. You know, collaborations are wonderful because that sense of equality is very strong in collaborations.

Your students come to us, our students come to you. Your faculty are engaged in research on this project and so are ours, and that equality is very apparent. It is much harder to do that trying to set up an entire programme unless it grows out of collaboration.

Kalra, the interviewer, mentions Brown's partnership program with St. Stephen's since 1991. Prof. Simmons says she's keen on expanding this program, as well as on collaboration with other institutions.

Links ...

1. Matt Taibbi at Taibblog: The Catholic Church is a Criminal Enterprise. Here's the Taibbi Treatment:

   One expects professional slimeballs like the public relations department of Goldman Sachs to pull out the “Well, we weren’t the only thieves!” argument when accused of financial malfeasance. But I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I read through Dolan’s retort and it dawned on me that he was actually going to use the “We weren’t the only child molesters!” excuse. Dolan must have very roomy man-robes, because it seems to me you’d need a set of balls like two moons of Jupiter to say such a thing in public and expect it to fly. But this is exactly what Dolan does; he bases his entire defense of the Church on the idea that others are equally culpable.

2. Thomas Benton in The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind':

   One reason that graduate school is for the already privileged is that it is structurally dependent on people who are neither privileged nor connected. Wealthy students are not trapped by the system; they can take what they want from it, not feel pressured, and walk away at any point with minimal consequences. They do not have to obsess about whether some professor really likes them. If they are determined to become academics, they can select universities on the basis of reputation rather than money. They can focus on research rather than scrambling for time-consuming teaching and research assistantships to help pay the bills. And, when they go on the market, they can hold out for the perfect position rather than accepting whatever is available.

   But the system over which the privileged preside does not ultimately depend on them for the daily functioning of higher education (which is now, as we all know, drifting toward a part-time, no-benefit business). The ranks of new Ph.D.'s and adjuncts these days are mainly composed of people from below the upper-middle class: people who believe from infancy that more education equals more opportunity. They see the professions as a path to security and status.

3. Massimo Pigliucci at Rationally Speaking: "Anything Is Possible." No, Not Really.

   Clearly, not anything is possible. It is pretty easy to come up with examples of things that are not possible: it is not possible for me both to be and not to be (pace Hamlet); it is not possible for me to levitate; and it is not even possible for me to be in Rome at this moment, because I’m in New York writing this essay.

   Those three examples are not picked at random, they illustrate three distinct classes of impossibility recognized by philosophers: the first is an instance of something that is logically impossible; the second is an example of physical impossibility; and the last one is an illustration of contingent impossibility.

4. Live Science: Babies Are Born To Dance. Check out the video.

What Teachers Make

Read Taylor Mali's poem. Better yet, watch him perform it.

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Why this link, why now? For no better reason than I found the video just now -- Seth Godin who tells us in another post what we "can learn from a lousy teacher."

Was Oliver Stone's 'Wall Street' a Success?

At the box office, it was. But, "as a vehicle for social change," Michael Lewis says, "it was a catastrophe."

One lesson that might be drawn from Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie, Wall Street, is how little control a movie director has over his audience. [...] What [Stone] wanted to do, it appeared, was to prosecute the values underpinning American capitalism. He cast Michael Douglas as a diabolical money manager named Gordon Gekko, and Charlie Sheen as a young stockbroker named Bud Fox, who, seduced by this devil, abandons his ideals, betrays his family, and is destroyed.

As social documentary, even as art, the original Wall Street was a great success. [...]

As a vehicle for social change, however, the movie was a catastrophe. It did not show Wall Street in its best light, yet Wall Street was, by far, the movie’s most enthusiastic audience. It has endured not because it hit its intended target but because it missed: people who work on Wall Street still love it. And not just any Wall Street people but precisely those who might have either taken Stone’s morality tale to heart or been offended by it. To wit, not long before hedge-fund manager Seth Tobias was found dead in his Florida swimming pool, with an unlucky mixture of cocaine, Ambien, and alcohol in his bloodstream, he gave an interview for Wall Street’s DVD bonus reel, in which he said, “I remember when I saw the movie in 1987. I recall saying, That’s what I want to be. I want to start out as Bud Fox and end up as Gordon Gekko.”

Michael Douglas often expresses his astonishment at the many Wall Street males who have sought him out in public places just to say, “Man, I want to tell you, you are the single biggest reason I got into the business. I watched Wall Street, and I wanted to be Gordon Gekko.”

QoTD: Moral Philosophy Edition

Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.
-- Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society [Source: Yves Smith's post]

Here's another version:

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith [Source: Brainy Quotes]

Ants, Sperms, Chemical Warfare!

Science blogging at its best. You've got to read Ed Yong's post summarizing a fascinating piece of research into (anti)competitive tactics of sperms. Here's the hook:

One night of passion and you're filled with a lifetime full of sperm with no need to ever mate again. As sex lives go, it doesn't sound very appealing, but it's what many ants, bees, wasps and termites experience. The queens of these social insects mate in a single "nuptial flight" that lasts for a few hours or days. They store the sperm from their suitors and use it to slowly fertilise their eggs over the rest of their lives. Males have this one and only shot at joining the Mile High Club and they compete fiercely for their chance to inseminate the queen. But even for the victors, the war isn't over. Inside the queen's body, their sperm continue the battle.

In the comments section, Yong receives this praise from the author of the research paper:

Hi Ed,

I found your blog online. I just wanted to say that I am really happy to see that you thought our paper was nice enough to write a piece about. You are clearly a talented writer, I think the way you wrote about our research is perfect, you got all the facts right and it is written in a very clear way.

It's awesome, thanks so much!
Best Wishes, Susanne den Boer

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Update: Edited to change the link to the current location of Yong's blog at Discover.com. The old link -- at ScienceBlogs.com is here.

HowTo: Account for teaching in university rankings

Phil Baty of Times Higher Education on the difficulty of arriving at a measure of the quality of teaching [so that this measure can be used in a ranking exercise]:

"To think that such a ratio [i.e., staff to student ratio, SSR] could signify 'teaching quality' shows how serious a problem we face with rankings that privilege the availability of a metric over its validity," the academic said.

He is, of course, right. The same point was made in a paper from the Russian Rectors' Union, handed to me by Victor Sadovnichiy, president of Moscow State University, earlier this month.

It argues that "good teachers always have a lot of students, bad teachers have few".

SSR figures are also easy to manipulate and hard to verify.

David Graham, provost of Concordia University in Canada, opened the web discussion by highlighting research that shows that a ratio of anywhere from 6:1 to 39:1 can be achieved with the same institution's data.

Monday Morning Math: Special Thursday Night Edition

This week's episode in Steven Strogatz's series Math: From Basic to Baffling is on differential geometry: Think Globally. While I leave it to you to read the article for all the good stuff -- and videos! -- about the shortest path between two points on curved surfaces, I want to excerpt something that makes this series truly great:

Sometimes when people say the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, they mean it figuratively, as a way of ridiculing nuance and affirming common sense. In other words, keep it simple. But battling obstacles can give rise to great beauty — so much so that in art, and in math, it’s often more fruitful to impose constraints on ourselves. Think of haiku, or sonnets, or telling the story of your life in six words. The same is true of all the math that’s been created to find the shortest way from here to there when you can’t take the easy way out.

Two points. Many paths. Mathematical bliss.

In search of power at airports

A fun read: Empowered by Susan Orlean.

... You may have a phone in your hand that can stream live video of the Large Hadron Collider accelerating particles in Switzerland, but if your little battery icon dips into red, you won’t even be able to dial out for pizza.

This link is dedicated to my physicist colleagues who, according to certain unnamed sources, have an unbeatable RMS velocity in spite of spending so much of their time at the airports.

Life of Data

Kurt D. Bollacker on Avoiding a Digital Dark Age -- "Data longevity depends on both the storage medium and the ability to decipher the information":

... [In] the 1980s I was in high school making backups of the hard drive of my PC onto 5-¼-inch floppy disks. I thought that because digital copies were “perfect,” and I could make perfect copies of perfect copies, I couldn’t lose my data, except by accident. I continued to believe that until years later in college, when I tried to restore my backup of 70 floppy disks onto a new PC. To my dismay, I discovered that I had lost the floppy disk containing the backup program itself, and thus could not restore my data. Some investigation revealed that the company that made the software had long since gone out of business. Requests on electronic bulletin board systems and searches on Usenet turned up nothing useful. Although all of the data on them may have survived, my disks were useless because of the proprietary encoding scheme used by my backup program.

The Dead Sea scrolls, made out of still-readable parchment and papyrus, are believed to have been created more than 2,000 years ago. Yet my barely 10-year-old digital floppy disks were essentially lost. I was furious! How had the shiny new world of digital data, which I had been taught was so superior to the old “analog” world, failed me? I wondered: Had I had simply misplaced my faith, or was I missing something?

Tough Times for Higher Ed: The UK Edition

Will Hutton plea/warning in The GuardianDon't destroy our universities. Our future depends on them:

... Britain has had a comparatively easy 30 years, courtesy first of North Sea oil and latterly from an unsustainable credit boom. Now we will have to earn our living – and universities are an indispensable means to doing just that. But instead of fighting for them, the political parties are talking of ring-fencing spending on health and the police and aid development – implying even bigger cuts ahead for universities. It is insane.

E-Certificates

A Mint story (by Ravi Krishnan, Pallavi Singh and Sapna Agarwal) on an interesting initiative which, I think, is also worthwhile:

Academic certificates from school to graduate and postgraduate levels, including professional degrees, will be mandatorily registered with the depository through the respective boards, universities and other institutions once the legislation is passed, with information retrievable on payment of a fee.

[...]

“The e-certificate programme would work very much like demat (dematerialization of shares), except that the physical copy of the certificate will be in the hands of the candidate,” he said.

The story also has this shocking statistic:

According to ... a background screening firm, at least 15% of resumes they checked last year had false information [...].

Money, Happiness, Neighbor

A study by researchers at the University of Warwick and Cardiff University has found that money only makes people happier if it improves their social rank. The researchers found that simply being highly paid wasn't enough – to be happy, people must perceive themselves as being more highly paid than their friends and work colleagues.

More here.