Sunday Posts

U-Aspire is meant to be a 'Global University'. It is not unduly ambitious: This is indeed the plan. It is not just rhetoric: This is an article of faith in the founding team that a platform must be created to serve the groundswell of global aspiration.  Higher Education is an innovator's paradise now, as most people seem to agree that it is broken. The Higher Ed sector collectively may not have made a smooth transition to post-industrial economy, and the need to do so is urgent. And, this transition will change everything: Not just the institutional structures and cost of delivery, which is a huge problem, but also the academic roles and cultures, and deeper embedded values. This isn't about public and private, whether or not Higher Ed should be a business, but really about finding a way to equip a global, aspirational, mobile generation, a generation of 'Makers', as Chris Anderson will call them. In context, 'Global University' isn't a gran...

At the core of what we do at U-Aspire is about preparing Global Managers. 'Intensely Global' is what we want our graduates to be, so that their ambition, vision and practises are aligned to the possibilities and challenges of globalisation.  The term, globalisation, is indeed laden with value judgements. At one end, activists may see this an inexorable expansion of global capital, steamrolling the diversity and flattening the communities across the world. On the other end of the spectrum, there are flat world celebrators, people who see the undoing the curse of the Babel, the world unifying around the English language, and democracy with centrist parties who are hard to tell from each other. Either in its demonic conception or the dragon-slayer one, Globalisation evokes strong sentiments: It needs explanation if we are to put this down as the key graduate attribute of the U-Aspire education. The rise of 'Global' in our lexicon is somewhat curious, tied closely ...

This is a bad time for globalism. The recession has renewed the fear of the others, and various politicians, from Japan to Italy to United States, are inventing foreign bogeymen to obscure their own failures. Companies, while desperate for ideas and for growth, are receding to respective homelands for safety: The only international bit they would still like to do is to keep their cashes stashed in tax havens. In fact, by doing so, they have given global business more bad press - Starbucks dodging taxes, Wal-Mart paying bribes and various banks, almost all of them, defrauding customers and governments alike. Critics can say that this was bound to happen and globalisation is a sham: But when it comes to climate change, nuclear disarmament, human rights, the issues that the same critics love, they concede that there is no alternative to concerted global action. I shall contend that global connections (or disconnections) are a function of technology and due to progress in transportati...

All Higher Education is local, because of its structure. Most of it is still delivered in attendance, which limits it to a locally resident community. Its funding is deeply anchored in alumni handouts or government grants, again with a mostly local orientation than not. However, the world of work has changed, and is changing further, and local comfort and global confidence have both become critical parts of skill set for most professions. I shall argue that most Higher Education do not address this need at all. In fact, truth be told, Higher Education often does more harm than good as far as these global-local balance is concerned. College creates prejudices rather than dispelling them. Students are told to see their classroom as a microcosm, a reflection of the wider world, and often impose the stereotypes thereof. The liberal end of this view is a rich country backpackers' view of the world, benign but flawed; at its other extreme, it is bigoted and dangerous: The Higher Ed ...

Our contexts are global already, and with every passing day, it will be more and more global. This is irreversible: The Information and Communication Technologies, the cheap travel, the global movements of capital, all point to the same direction. However, I say this with sadness, as I mourn the passing of the local, the familiar and the native; I am not a cheerleader of the march of the flat world. Rather, I am deeply foreign, a person from the periphery rather than the centre, and my world and upbringing are full of special things that will need preserving. But I say this as a statement of fact, something that is happening in front of us, and with foreboding, because if we live in denial, we get marginalised. If this isn't a celebration of globalism, I am not complaining either. It is not just that global reach of technologies and global reach of money has suddenly ripped open the treasure trove of my childhood land; I see globalism as an inherent tendency, an inescapable fu...

In constructing a model for global education, the biggest challenge to negotiate is one that of local context. From the high ideal of global skills, it may not be visible that same words may mean different things for different people, and there is no universal agreement on how businesses should run and societies should function. This is where our business model of delivering British Education programmes worldwide comes up for a reality check. This is where we are having to think beyond the technology: In fact, technology plays only a minor part in the plans we are putting together. The consideration of context introduces a layer of complexity beyond just the online provision of teaching in our plans. We wouldn't be counting on the lazy assumption that if we put a set of good tutors and smart technologies, everything will fall in place. One of the things about Independent Education is that the success of students is everything: It is they who pay the bill, and it would be wrong t...

All Higher Education is intensely local. Its form and agenda are defined by who pays: As long as most degree-granting institutions are funded by local and national governments, this will remain the case. For all the talk about 'global higher education', the idea is mostly to export locally constructed ideas of education, to promote national brands abroad, to import students where possible. Indeed, it is only fair to acknowledge that Higher Education is also one of the most regulated of the sectors, and most nations only want the Higher Education institutions they can control. Whatever the rhetoric, the national governments don't want global higher education: They just want global investment in local Higher Education. But Higher Education needs to be GLOBAL. This relates to the purpose of higher education, which, I shall claim, has expanded beyond the making of citizens to, in the era of mass higher education, making workers and consumers. And, since the expectations of...

If I am working for one thing, it is to create a truly global college, which prepares the students to take advantage of the global opportunities that are in front of us. I am conscious that there are many generalisations in that goal: The globalisation that we see is at best semi-globalisation, and the world is still a very divided space; the opportunities are still very skewed, and biased in favour of a few; and the model, education for profit, may have its own inherent biases that may change how and what the students can be prepared for.  However, it must be said, my approach is informed by my background, and therefore, despite these apparently insurmountable challenges, I remain optimistic. I come from a suburb near Calcutta, a metropolitan city in India, but growing up in the suburb, it seemed a million miles away. I had not been out and about on my own in the big city, which was only few miles away from where I lived, till I was almost 18. Indeed, I had a fairly protected...

College, except the rhetoric, remains an intensely local affair. One may talk about globalisation of education, of jobs and of knowledge, but only 2% of world's students study outside their home countries. Over the last 150 years, during which the universities were revived - and rightly, this was a revival as John Ruskin meant 'revival is of things that did not exist before' - the nation state has claimed it fully. Mostly in the name of teaching the 'useful arts', primarily in United States but also elsewhere in Europe, the state claimed the universities and turned them, rightly, into the instruments of making citizens. Indeed, this meant a two-, or a multi-tier system, that of making the rulers and the ruled, and alongside newspapers, the university education was essential to the making of modern state. Now that the state is in retreat, the college is somewhat left on its own. Besides, the great mythology of meritocracy, that everyone had the same chance in li...

The Higher Education community in Britain is up in arms as they found out how many times David Willetts, the Universities and Sciences Minister, met representatives from two large 'American' Education companies, Pearson and Kaplan, before the White Paper outlining the new funding regime for British Higher Education was published. The conspiracy theorists are indeed claiming that the white paper is a naked attempt to introduce American style Private Higher Education in Britain, and these meetings 'prove' that. Indeed, there is nothing surprising about the Government's intent to create an organized private education sector - that is the easiest way to squeeze cost efficiencies and reduce the burden on exchequer - but the existence of the Americans in the equation was the real issue in this debate. Outside the circles where Private Higher Education is considered blasphemous, there is quite a buzz about these meetings as well. There are more players in the market than...

India is higher education’s wild west, so says The Economist. That’s spot on. This is the macho territory, where none of the genteelness of the Higher Education world is in evidence. Those who survive need the mercenary spirit, whether they are on the right or the wrong side, and need, indeed, plenty of luck and firepower. But, then, this is also the land of possibilities, as Wild West was supposed to be. This is a land of an emerging, aspiring middle class, a country of the fastest growing cities in the world, of millions of entrepreneurs, of some of the hungriest companies in the world. Besides, most of the people are young, unlike China’s, and a country poised at the threshold of a huge demographic boom. If someone thinks the El Dorado of education is in India, he won’t be too far off the mark. However, despite all this, the Gold Rush moment is yet to come. Not too far, I shall argue, about six months’ away is the moment when everyone goes to India. The Indian cabinet is finalizing...

The recession is refusing to go away. Even before some good news emerged in the United States - at last - Europe started crumbling. It was Deja Vu all over again: The leaders' scramble, a patched up loan fund, a North-South divide, and one crisis after another. We are just in the Christmas Break from the crisis, and there is no signs yet that the domino effect has been contained. And, it is not about the financial crisis alone. The world continued its journey towards becoming a more dangerous place. Despite some drone-induced victory against Al Queda and Asif Zardari clinging on to power by his teeth in Pakistan, the American-led coalition in Asia looked tired and divided, ready to cut-and-run, in contrast with their opponents, who seemed to have an endless stream of recruits, covert state sponsors and a zeal to continue for thousand years. North Korea, on the brink under pressures of economic crisis and leadership succession, continued to play dangerously. The Chinese induced...

I am back in my usual reflective mood and enjoying it. I was in action mode for last few weeks, which allowed me to achieve quite a bit, but this caused a sort of writing block too. Indeed, this is what I wished for - something worthwhile to do. All my stated wishes, hands-on exposure, opportunity to work on an assortment of various little projects [so that I am never bored], regular life, and a piece of action in global higher education, have all been granted: But, strangely, this has taken away my ability to write. Much to the relief of my sister, I admit, but I struggled with thoughts and words every morning. It was not comforting: The thoughts seem all too fragmented and words so ungenerous that they would not come together in a sentence. I felt laden with ideas, but all clotted up in a pre -migraine kaleidoscope of visions, not making any sense whatsoever. However, a visit unlocked all this, and as I expected, it started with a question. I spent the day in Oxford, attending a sess...

The modern universities were instrumental in building the modern nation state. Think Oxbridge and Britain, the Ivy League and the United States or the Ecoles and Modern France, and one gets the idea. The modern secular universities effectively took over learning from the Church, and promoted scientific research and nation-based citizenships instead. So, the universities and national identities remain tied by some sort of intellectual umbilical chord to this day. But that may all be changing. We are currently experiencing one of the severest economic crisis since the Second World War. Once in a lifetime recessions such as this, with the social pains it brings, act as inflection points for civilization, and brings new ideas and concepts on its wake. This recession is no exception. In years immediately preceding the recession, despite the great progress of technologies of globalisation, the human civilization was going the opposite direction intellectually: the reaffirmation of na...