For intellectual brand leadership

Amidst the Indo-US snugfest, can Oxford realistically reclaim leadership from Harvard in Indian perception?

As behoves an elected-for-life Chancellor of a university regarded for centuries as the global intellectual leader, Chris Patten is not given to quicksilver soundbytes.

Nor does he distance himself unduly from the market exigencies that make his task "" drawing India's brightest, after half a century, back to an Oxford education "" ever so daunting.

"I don't think anybody in England sensibly believes we're a great power. I believe we're a great country "" England punches above its weight," says Patten, citing a statistic in support: with 1 per cent of world population, the country accounts for 8.5 per cent of published work in science.

Work in business, though, gets the most attention nowadays, and American universities are way ahead on that score. Would the term "brand" as applied to Oxford offend him?

"It has a brand, which research suggests is the best known (education) brand in the world... partly because of its age, partly its boat race, and partly because it's there in any branch of new knowledge and research." This includes business, with the start of its Said Business School in 1996 "" now a brand in itself.

Yet, recent decades have seen Indian students turn in droves to the US, drawn by scholarships and settlement prospects. The IIMs' adoption of the American B-school MBA model (devised to impart a business education to engineers, in particular) played a vital role too in catapulting attention across the Atlantic. As also Harvard's emergence as the place for executive education and strategy.

The turn of the millennium has seen a turnaround of sorts, with some 16-17,000 Indians at British universities currently, thrice the level of the 1980s and 1990s.

Oxford has seen an upturn too (160 Indians there at the moment), and with a new emphasis on South Asian studies and India's role in the world, the university hopes to attract many more students in assorted disciplines.

Oxford, Patten reckons, is uniquely placed to reinvigorate an old relationship with India that has always boasted of a special sense of mutual understanding. The first visit from Oxford to India was made back in 1576, by a priest.

Even now, just look at the Indian art and cultural artefacts on the campus, exhorts the man whose daughter Alice has recently starred in a Hindi blockbuster.

"When you know somebody well," smiles Patten, "you know not just the virtues, but the faults and vices as well."

But is this sort of soft appeal going to make any headway in an increasingly business-like India? Not to Jagdish Sheth's mind.

"The argument that Indians and the British relate better to each other is an exaggeration," says the professor of marketing at Emory's Goizueta B-school, "It's just something they're trying hard to sell."

But then, Patten isn't here just on a jaw-jaw mission, talking ties. He has an economic proposition as well. Studying in the UK is actually cheaper now, he assures. More convincingly, he argues that Indian students of the past sought American economic opportunities, and thus studied in America.

But with globalisation and India's own emergence as a high-value job destination, the university decision need no longer be contrained by factors other than the value of education in itself.

On that score, Said Business School and other departments may indeed have a special claim to quality. And one that even Sheth, a champion of closer US-India ties, displays no reluctance in granting Oxford.

America's accreditation system for academics is far too regimented to allow much infusion of expertise from the corporate arena into business academia, says Sheth.

British universities in general, and Oxford in particular, are far less regimented, allowing them the flexibility to be that much more responsive to evolving needs in the global market for business education. With an added research thrust, Said could go quite far, he adds.

Oxford is looking for Indian research inputs, says Patten, confident that its focus on the Indian market could help take the edge off the Ivy League's appeal.

That may be so. Oxford is back at least in the reckoning for leadership, even as Said makes its way into Indian mindspace. But would that imply a return to an extended tool of imperial influence?

Oh no! Patten doesn't bat an eyelid. "I think we're increasingly aware of India's influence on British institutions." And if that's not charm enough: "I'd like Oxford to be part of India's future and India to be part of Oxford's."