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Simpson, Tripathi travel to India
President John B. Simpson lights an oil lamp on the stage at the MITES graduation, a standard ritual that begins ceremonies of this kind in India. Provost Satish K. Tripathi is pictured on the left in the red gown. Photo: STEPHEN DUNNETT
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“Our trip has helped position UB to expand its involvement in India and open new opportunities for our students and faculty there.”
President John B. Simpson led a UB delegation to India earlier this month to participate in the first graduation ceremony for the School of Management’s master’s degree program in information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services (MITES), conducted at the Bangalore campus of Amrita University, one of UB’s major partner institutions in that country.
In addition to President and Mrs. Katherine Simpson, the delegation to India included Provost Satish and Mrs. Kamlesh Tripathi; Arjang Assad, dean of the School of Management; Stephen C. Dunnett, vice provost for international education; Richard V. Lee, professor of medicine; Bharat Jayaraman, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering; Ramaswamy Ramesh, professor and chair of the Department of Management Science and Systems; and Joseph J. Hindrawan, assistant vice provost for international education.
“The president’s trip to India was exceptionally productive in terms of advancing our institutional interests and affiliations in the country,” Dunnett said. “As a result of our visits to partner universities and many meetings and discussions with Indian colleagues, UB has greatly increased its visibility and reputation in India. In fact, UB is now recognized as one of the most actively engaged U.S. research universities currently operating in the country. Our trip has helped position UB to expand its involvement in India and open new opportunities for our students and faculty there,” he added.
In the course of five days, the delegation visited four Amrita University campuses in three southern Indian states to explore potential areas of cooperation in research, education and outreach. The Amrita visit culminated with the signing of a comprehensive memorandum of understanding calling for increased collaboration in a number of areas, including the health sciences, the humanities, social work and law.
During the visit to Bangalore, it also was announced that UB would be partnering with Amrita on a new master of science program in embedded systems, to be conducted by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in cooperation with colleagues at Amrita’s School of Engineering. In addition, the MITES program, beginning with the second class, would be reconfigured as a master of science in information technology services (MITS) to better reflect the scope and purpose of the program.
At the commencement ceremony for the first MITES class on Feb. 7, Simpson conferred degrees on 54 mid-level managers, most of whom are employed by Hewlett Packard India.
“We are proud to partner with Amrita University, an international leader in training the information technology, management and engineering professionals who contribute in vital ways to global economic and technological advancement,” Simpson noted.
“Our first dual-degree program with Amrita University has quickly proven to be a very successful one, as was clear from the impressive achievements of the graduates we honored at the MITES commencement. I am confident that these two newly launched programs will be equally successful, and we look forward to celebrating the achievements of the first graduates of these programs in another year from now,” Simpson said.
Since the MITES students are working professionals, class instruction, which began during the summer of 2007, was conducted over weekends. Faculty members were drawn both from the Amrita School of Business at Coimbatore and the UB School of Management.
Assad explained that in addition to content related to IT-services management, students received a solid grounding in such key areas as finance and accounting, and developed skills in leadership and strategic thinking.
During the Amrita visit, Simpson held meetings with the senior leaders of Amrita University, including Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Amma), a well-known spiritual and humanitarian leader who is the founder and chancellor of Amrita University. Also attending the meetings were P. Venkat Rangan, vice chancellor, who has visited UB several times, and Brahmachari Abhayamrita Chaitanya, the pro-chancellor of Amrita, as well as deans and other university leaders.
The UB delegation began its visit to India on Feb. 2 with a tour of the Amrita School of Medical Sciences (AIMS) in Kochi, Kerala, which is ranked among the best teaching hospitals and clinical care centers in South India. During the visit, Lee explored opportunities for UB’s School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences to exchange students and faculty with AIMS, and later traveled to King George’s Hospital in Lucknow, a leading medical facility in the north, to discuss opportunities with that institution.
The delegation also visited the schools of Ayurveda, Biotechnology and Engineering at the Amritapuri campus, also in Kerala. On the following day, the team was in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, to participate in the national symposium “Water for All.”
The symposium’s keynote speaker was R. Chidambaram, principal scientific advisor to the Indian government. Chidambaram also joined the delegation and senior Amrita faculty for a panel discussion on building world-class universities, at which Simpson and Tripathi delivered a presentation on UB 2020.
"In order to become world-class, a university needs to foster the culture of research," said Jayaraman. “UB is working with Amrita to advance a number of collaborative research initiatives of mutual interest.”
The previous day the UB delegation had taken note of the research initiatives at Amrita, among them the development of an inexpensive insulin pump, deployment of a wireless sensor network to predict landslides, tissue engineering and stem cell research.
"It is extraordinary what Amrita has been able to accomplish in its short history,” Tripathi said. “To have developed in the space of only 15 years a first-class research institution with the highest accreditation rating from the national accrediting agency is truly remarkable. I know of no other institution in India with a comparable record of achievement.”
Chidambaram was impressed by the Amrita collaboration with UB, noting that the partnership could be a role model for similar alliances by other educational institutions in the country.
The delegation also visited Varanasi, a world-famous religious and cultural center, and the home of Banaras Hindu University (BHU), one of India’s leading public research universities. UB and BHU had signed a comprehensive agreement in August 2007 when the vice chancellor of BHU visited UB; several UB officials, including Tripathi and Dunnett, have visited BHU previously. Tripathi is a BHU alumnus.
While in Varanasi, the delegation was hosted by Vice Chancellor D.P. Singh for a meeting with senior leadership of BHU to share information and explore potential cooperation. The delegation toured the campus and visited a variety of key research and academic units of BHU, including the faculties of engineering, science, fine arts and performing arts. There was discussion of a new UB study abroad program at BHU slated for the next winter intersession.
The delegation’s next stop was the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, one of only six high-profile institutes in the country dedicated to information technology and a UB exchange partner.
During the visit to IIIT-A, Simpson was a keynote speaker at the International Symposium on Higher Education and the Global Society, which was co-moderated by Dunnett. Simpson’s paper focused on issues of student access and mobility in U.S. and Indian higher education. Among the other presenters at the symposium were vice chancellors from a number of Indian universities.
“In an era of great change, American and Indian higher education are both confronting the challenge of trying to increase access to higher education and increase mobility across borders of all kinds—not only for students but for faculty, ideas, research and intellectual collaboration,” Simpson said in his address.
“Both our countries are large democracies with very large systems of higher education; both are committed to opening higher education opportunity to a larger segment of their populations. And I believe our two systems have much to learn from each other.”
Prior to returning to the U.S., the delegation visited the headquarters of the U.S. Educational Foundation in India (USEFI) in New Delhi, which administers the Fulbright program in India. For many years UB has attended USEFI-hosted student recruitment fairs in New Delhi and other major Indian cities.
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