Liberal Arts: Why foreign scholars are choosing to teach in Indian universities

NEW DELHI: Barry Rodrigue resigned from a tenured position in a US public university to teach at Symbiosis School of Liberal Arts in 2016. “I met the SSLA director (Anita Patankar) and deputy director (Shweta Sinha Deshpande) in 2016 during an academic visit to India,” he said. “They gave me a tour of their institute, where I met the faculty, staff, and students. They then invited me to come and teach with them. After consulting with my family, I resigned from my tenured position at a public university in the United States, and we moved to Pune.” He is now a full-time faculty member at the SSLA, a part of Symbiosis International University in Pune, Maharashtra.

A geographer, archaeologist and folklorist, Rodrigue is professor of anthropology, scholar-in-residence and faculty-in-charge of the SSLA Collaborative for Asian Anthropology at Symbiosis. It is his first time teaching at an Indian institution.

Foreign scholars come to Symbiosis through a number of routes. Some, like Rodrigue, are recruited directly; others come in as scholars-in-residence as part of different forms of partnership with international institutions.

A distinctive feature of private liberal arts universities is the large cohort of foreign faculties teaching students, which even the premier public institutions have been struggling to build. Not only does the National Education Policy 2020 emphasise “internationalisation”, it is also an important parameter in global university rankings.

Through research collaborations, international hiring and partnerships with foreign universities, liberal arts universities have built faculties with a significant presence of scholars from other countries. Most come from universities in the United Kingdom and the United States. Some are full-time faculty, having shifted their base to India; others teach part-time but carry out research projects.

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Choosing Indian universities

Internationalisation at SSLA has taken place through multiple programmes, such as “Global Immersion Programme, Scholar in Residence, Short Duration Fellowships and Teaching Collaboration across courses”, said Shweta Sinha Deshpande, director and associate professor at SSLA.

“Our classroom spaces are inclusive of joint sessions where students from both universities engage in virtual classrooms where they hear perspectives from teachers from both cultures, work on assignments together, and engage in virtual spaces outside the classroom for an understanding of each other’s cultures for a more in-depth understanding of multiculturalism. SSLA and partner university faculty also travel in person to the other institution for a more interactive learning engagement for students and themselves.”

Zafar Iqbal, associate professor and director, MS in Marketing Program, department of Marketing. DePaul University, Chicago, teaches at SSLA as a scholar-in-residence.

“I have been involved with building the partnership between DePaul University and SSLA since 2011. I
was keenly aware of the calibre of faculty and students at SSLA having met and interacted with many of them over the years. Faculty from my own university had partnered with the SSLA faculty and had high praise for them and the students. Given this history, and despite my not being a professor within any liberal arts domain, I decided to teach at SSLA,” said Iqbal, who also mentors students with dissertations. The course he teaches is called “marketing strategy”.

Kit Patrick, assistant professor, School of Liberal Studies, BML Munjal University, moved from University of Bristol, seven years ago. “India has become my home. My wife’s family is scattered across the country. I’ve been coming to India as much as possible for more than 20 years. About seven years ago I had the opportunity to move here full-time, continuing my career in academia,” said Patrick. He had heard about the opportunity through colleagues at other institutions.

“There aren’t many academics in the world, fewer philosophy academics, and even fewer philosophy academics in India. So we tend to know quite a lot about what is going on in other institutions. Actually, I’m personally very bad at networking. But I’m lucky enough to have very good contacts who are much better than me. They were connected to some of the folks setting up Munjal’s new school of liberal studies and put me in touch,” said Patrick.

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Teaching in India

Most faculty, whether full-time or part-time, found students more polite and attentive but also there were gender divisions; they had to be mindful of caste and the cultural references.

Scott Paeth, a professor of Religious studies at DePaul University, who teaches at SSLA, said, “As an American experiencing what it’s like to teach in an Indian school for the first time, there are a lot of small surprises, the first of which is probably having tea brought to the classroom at about the half-way mark. That’s certainly not something that happens in an American university! Apart from that though, I found students to be attentive and polite in a way that is not always the case in an American school, and also a level of preparation for class that I’m not used to.”

Patrick found differences in the university communities. While a private university is not as much of a microcosm of society as its public counterparts, it still reflects many of the divisions and conflicts.

“Community is the single most important aspect of learning. And in India there are special challenges. There are social divisions everywhere. But the divisions of language, class and caste in India have their own unique spurs and blades attached to them. Some colleges manage to help students overcome them; others do not. Gender divisions are also different,” said Patrick. Teaching topics like philosophy of sex can be tricky in India.

Plus, teachers also have to contend with students damaged by the intensely-competitive exam-oriented final years of school. “In India, many students here have suffered terribly from their 12th standard experience. For them, it was a desperate rush to get the highest marks. This can deaden intellectual curiosity. In some, it leads to thinking they are much less capable than they really are. They’re often much to unlearn before students can flourish as an undergraduate,” said Patrick.

Even Rodrigue talked about the very focussed structure of the Indian education system.

“There are some profound differences between university education in the US and India. One of the most apparent is the very focused set of requirements that Indian students follow. In the US, much is also expected, but students have more choice in how to fulfill requirements,” added Rodrigue.

Students also lead vastly different lives. “Most students at DePaul University work 20+ hours a week in part-time jobs and internships whereas the students at SSLA were all full-time students,” Iqbal pointed out.

“Thus, while SSLA students have more time to devote to their education, DePaul students bring more worldly experience into the classroom. Second, many DePaul students have taken loans and/or are paying for part of their university fees themselves, whereas SSLA students are mostly supported by their families – this makes DePaul students more interested in the return of interest of their education as compared to SSLA students. The flip side of this is that the learning environment at SSLA is more driven by in-class performance on tests, projects, and exams whereas at DePaul, the learning environment is driven by the relevance of what is taught to the outside world,” said Iqbal.

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Liberal arts: Structure, curriculum

Despite their ‘global’ character, private universities’ curriculum is naturally rooted in the Indian context and there are also differences in the grading pattern on which central regulators have a say.

Derick H Lindquist, dean, Jindal School of Psychology and Counselling at OP Jindal Global University, said: “There, the first two years of college are spent taking ‘general’ coursework. A major is decided by the end of year two, and the final two years are spent taking coursework specific to degree. While the new NEP-mandated four-year degree is closer to the American model, emphasising holistic education, the overall design is still quite distinct.”

“Apart from content, which is similar in both countries, grading in India has a lower threshold — e.g., 80% or above for an Outstanding. In the US, by comparison, 80% would be a B- grade; an A would require 95% or higher. These aren’t criticisms, but simply the most obvious differences, in my opinion,” added Lindquist

Jindal has over 71 full-time foreign faculty originating from 32 countries.

Rodrigue added, “The Indian educational system seems to be more structured than I am used to in
the US. For the most part, in American universities there is less oversight of the curriculum than seems to be the case in India, and the course and curricular goals are usually set at a more local level”.

Some point out that the difference in curriculum exists between liberal arts universities in India itself.

“The liberal arts curricula in India vary tremendously depending on the type of college, at least in my own speciality of philosophy. In Ashoka, for example, they teach something fairly similar to what’s taught in English speaking universities in the West. You’ll study the famous books that students have been studying in the West for centuries. Such colleges add some courses about Indian philosophy and thought too; they aren’t simply Western universities in India. There’s much to be said for this approach. Another model, followed by places like Azim Premji and BMU, is to make the curriculum revolve around India, with most or all courses being based around either Indian ideas or the Indian context. Ideas from the West are still used a great deal, but they are more often applied to Indian case studies or culture,” said Patrick.

He adds an example about the paper on political philosophy where the focus is on the major political ideologies in India: Indian nationalism, Indian liberalism, and Indian Marxism.

“The courses end up quite different to the standard courses in the West. This focus on India is quite unusual; you would struggle to find any curriculum in the UK which has so much focus on British history. The focus on India has both costs and advantages; a happy example of the latter is that more of the best students are staying in India after their studies,” he said.