Yale University to collaborate with Indian institutes to promote academic leadership

NEW DELHI - The Yale University, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Kozhikode and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, here on Thursday, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to promote academic leadership in India.

Human Resource Development Minister, Kapil Sibal, was present at the signing of the MoU by President of Yale University Richard Levin, the Director of IIM Kozhikode Debashis Chatterjee, and Director of IIT Kanpur Sanjay Dhande.

Calling India a partner in this age of global education, Levin said that working with the institutions would advance the cause of higher education in India.

“To work with Vice-Chancellors from around India, to help acquaint them with some of the techniques and strategies and ways of operations that we practice in United States. We have done a similar programme with university leaders in China and it’s been very informative for both sides,” said Levin.

“I expect I will learn a lot about Indian system by doing this and I think Indian leaders of educational institutions will take a lot away from learning about American practices,” he added.

The new partnership is slated to be part of the Singh-Obama Knowledge Initiative that was established by the governments of India and the United States during the 2009 visit of - Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Washington.

The programme will be known as the ‘India-Yale University Leadership Programme’ and it will expose university and academic leaders in India at the levels of the Vice-Chancellors, directors and deans, to the best practices of academic administration and institutional management in the United States.

Sibal underlined the importance of the programme and said it will help to create world-class educational leaders in India.

“We don’t have the kind of quality leaders like Richard Levin. Like these kind of global leaders in the area of education, we don’t have in India and therefore we can not replicate the Richard Levins of the world, but we can certainly try and gain from there experience. And that’s really the purpose, to engage Yale, to request Yale to give us the platform through which our leadership can be developed,” said Sibal.

The Yale-IIM-IIT agreement comes only one week before United States of America President Obama’s visit to India and represents an important effort to advance India-US bilateral cooperation in the area of higher education.

Obama will visit New Delhi on November 6. (ANI)