Top Universities in India Will Look Abroad for Faculty Members

[Harold Schiffman]

August 27, 2007

Top Universities in India Will Look Abroad for Faculty Members

New Delhi — India's minister in charge of higher education told
reporters on Friday that he has "no problem" with India's elite
engineering and management institutes' hiring foreign faculty members.
Until now the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian
Institutes of Management have been allowed to hire foreign professors
only on a part-time or contract basis.

"Following dearth of qualified teachers in the field of higher
education, we have no problem inviting foreign nationals or people
with Indian origin as teachers for IIT's and IIM's provided they
fulfill the stipulated legal formalities," Arjun Singh, minister of
human-resource development, told local reporters.

Ashok Misra, director of Mumbai's Indian Institute of Technology, told
The Chronicle that the institutes had yet to get a formal letter
approving foreign hiring, but that the minister's statement seemed to
indicate such an approval was imminent. The country's seven Indian
Institutes of Technology and six Indian Institutes of Management –- at
all of which instruction is in English — have in recent years sought
approval of full-time foreign hires to combat faculty shortages.

"Exposure to foreign faculty is very important for the students and
will help boost research as well," said Mr. Misra, adding that most
engineering schools around the world have faculty members from
different countries. Mr. Misra said that academics in some European
countries as well as Indian expatriates who settled abroad for jobs
had expressed interest in teaching at the engineering institutes. He
added, though, that the low salaries would need to be raised in order
to attract foreign professors to the local jobs. —Shailaja Neelakantan

http://chronicle.com/news/index.php?id=2919

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 Harold F. Schiffman


Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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