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Liberal Smarts
May's Harvard Commencement was a special one for Anand Mahindra (MBA 1981), chairman and managing director of the Indian conglomerate Mahindra & Mahindra, as the University used the occasion to recognize him and two others with the Harvard Medal for extraordinary service. But such graduation ceremonies will soon become routine for Mahindra: Next month, the first class of about 200 students start classes at Mahindra École Centrale, a new Hyderabad-based engineering college launched by a Mahindra subsidiary in partnership with École Centrale Paris, one of France's top engineering schools. We talked to Mahindra about higher education, his passion for liberal arts, and his grand plans for an American-style university in India.
What gap did you see in education that required this new school?
In India, there is an insatiable need for quality higher education. There have been a number of engineering schools that have sprouted up in the last decade, and it might appear as if demand has been met. If you filter these engineering institutes using the lens of quality, though, you find that we are really not meeting the demands for making better engineers. But we will differentiate ourselves by making sure that all students will be exposed to a core curriculum of liberal arts. That has long been my credo—that if you want to turn out balanced leaders, not just one-dimensional people coming out from a factory conveyor belt, you need exposure to liberal arts.
How did your own educational experience influence this decision to focus on liberal arts?
I majored in visual and environmental studies and specialized in filmmaking, and I joke with my colleagues that I made up for my sins in liberal arts by getting a business degree. But I think it has made me a better decision maker. It makes me question more. It makes me consider a greater spectrum of factors when I make decisions.
Is the Hyderabad campus just the beginning?
We want to set up five colleges in different parts of the country and connect them through digital technology, so you can have a professor in a particular discipline teaching across all institutes. We are also "incubating" the concept of a Mahindra University, modeled after the US university system, with different schools teaching different disciplines—a school of public health, a business school. The schools might be in different parts of India, but given technology today, we see no reason why you can't build a university that has multiple physical campuses and knit them together.
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