Shyamal Majumdar: Teachers as entrepreneurs

THE HUMAN FACTOR

On his latest visit to India from his workplace in the US, Dr Sumit Kundu had a pretty hectic schedule: negotiating with top hotels and airlines to get the best deal for a delegation that is planning a two-week trip to three Indian cities in July; undertaking public relations activities; convincing top bosses in Indian companies to meet the delegation members; and ensuring that the team spends quality time in India. All this while keeping a close watch on the tight budget.

All this sounds like a routine job for any senior corporate executive, but quite unusual for a university teacher like Kundu, who is the Ingersoll Rand professor at the Florida International University.

Kundu, however, thinks his job is no big deal. "Professors can't live in ivory towers any more. It's tough competition out there and one has to face the reality. A professor has to behave like a business manager too," he says.

In the US as in many other countries, gone is the cushy life of a tenured professor, which included long summer vacations, paid sabbaticals, free time for outside consulting, and every fringe benefit God ever invented.

Amidst mounting complaints that faculties were accountable to no one, that colleges have failed to increase productivity, and that they cost too much, colleges have started redefining the role of professors "" teaching remains the line function, but most have taken on the role of profit centre heads too.

For instance, Kundu, who is also the faculty director of the University of Florida's Executive MBA programme, is responsible for quality teaching as well as raising revenues and earns a respectable margin from trips like the one he is planning for his 30 MBA students from July 28 to August 9.

He has planned and tied up everything to the most minute of details, including the sight-seeing tours. The trip is part of the "external visits" included in the MBA course curriculum and Kundu's brief is no different from that of a business manager's: students are coming to get a first-hand feel of the way India Inc conducts its business and must consider the visit as time well spent.

After extensive meetings over a week, the professor is relieved as he has been able to line up interactive sessions with top executives at Wipro, Infosys and Mphasis in Bangalore; GlaxoSmithkline, Philips, Siemens, ABN Amro and so on in Mumbai; and Ranbaxy and Everest Industries in Delhi.

Why India? Kundu says in the past five years, emerging markets like India and China are being seen as hotbeds of economic growth.

"Our university's MBA programme targets the top companies worldwide that can provide students with the opportunity to gain hands-on experience on real time projects and with cutting edge technology," he says. No wonder the professor's marketing pitches went down quite well with the India Inc bosses.

Experts say this redefinition of a teacher's role was bound to happen as business schools the world over are facing an escalating financial crisis in one of the most competitive markets for management education in years.

While government support is dwindling, the first impulse of a B-school director may be to slash student enrolment, downsize faculty and raise tuition.

While the last one is not a real option amidst mounting criticism over skyrocketing tuition fees, the first two are not desirable since these are only cutbacks of the last resort for an educational institution.

What makes the job of running a B-school more difficult is that often, a school's return on investment can't be measured in monetary terms alone. For instance, reputation. Also, a B-school must provide academic value to its students and meet the demands of business.

Professors like Kundu say that about 60 per cent of an American university's resources comes from students and the balance from external activities like corporate training, counselling, external trips and so on.

So most B-schools have adopted an entrepreneurial model for raising revenue by selling services to corporations to subsidise individual tuitions.

Administrators of schools with strong R&D work, for instance, are now insisting that they have a talented faculty capable of bringing corporate sponsorships to the labs, while having the legal expertise to protect their own intellectual property and so on.

Kundu believes it's time for university faculties to commit to entrepreneurship as one of the main academic goals "" one that drives revenue while building prestige for the institution.

The B-school faculties in the US have been learning fast to bridge the cultural gap between academia and entrepreneurship. Some food for thought for teachers in India.