Tuesday, December 08, 2009

IIT Gandhinagar attracts quality faculty

IIT Gandhinagar has received nearly 700 applicants for faculty positions, half of whom are NRIs from quality institutions abroad, ET reports :
Director of IIT-Gandhinagar Sudhir Kumar Jain said at least three NRIs teaching in prestigious universities in the US and Singapore will join them by the end of December. ....

"This is a great development as we would get Indians who are involved in cutting-edge research and academics and are finding opportunities in India attractive. More so for us as the faculty would get to prove academic excellence given that we are a new institute compared to other IITs and hence more open to ideas," says Jain. ...

"To attract more talent from abroad, we are also offering them option to go abroad twice a year to pursue research and academics," says Jain.
So much for the supposed faculty crunch and the problems new IITs would have. I feel vindicated because I have always held that the newer IITs and IIMs would be able to attract faculty by offering suitable terms (not higher salaries but the flexibility indicated above).

In some ways, they may have a better chance of getting good faculty because in the existing institutions, entrenched interests are often the biggest obstacle to getting faculty- they simply won't let very talented or reputed academics in. Agreed, it is not easy to entice academics based abroad, so there are supply-side problems. But the artificial problems on the demand side are also a factor - and this is generally overlooked. Besides, NRIs would prefer to get back to their home town or to some place close to it and may want to steer clear of the larger metros where the older IITs and IIMs are located.

Somehow, IITs and IIMs have not used the mechanism of well-endowed chairs in order to attract talent. This is again primarily because the academics who are already in think they have first rights to any chair that is created and, often, they can't agree amongst themselves as to who deserves it. As a result, chairs are not created and, when created, go untenanted.

The IIT Gandhinagar experience is very promising indeed and augurs well for the government's decision to set up new IITs and IIMs. We need competition for the four or five IITs and IIMs that dominate the field today. So, all power to the new institutions.

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Anonymous said...

I looked up the profiles of the persons mentioned. Only the NUS professor actually teaches at NUS. The other two at Columbia and Georgia Tech are not professors but post-doctoral fellows. I know from experience that in the sciences US post-doc fellows with PhDs from India are NEVER offered faculty positions in any good US university. So they are returning not for the IIT charm, but because the US wont accept them long-term in an equivalent position.

Anonymous said...

Anon@3:

You may want to take back your "NEVER" claim. Here's a counter-example: CS.UIUC hired Madhusudan Parthasarathy (http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/~madhu).

Serious employers are not so much bothered about where the candidates obtained their PhDs, but the quality of their work and the impact they have had.