>IIT faculty getting younger by the year

>Campuses across India are getting younger. Aggressive, single and idealistic were, for long, associated with students. Today, faculty shares the same space. In the 1980s, anyone who walked into a packed class at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) was a grey-haired wise 60-year-old. Most had folded their crazy daily schedule and decided to settle on a leafy quiet campus in a job that didn’t come with unachievable targets of the corporate world.

Today, the age gap between a faculty and a student is closing. Recruitment records from the IIT-Kanpur show that between 1990 and 2010, the average age of freshly recruited teachers fell from mid-50s to early-30s. Now, for many the life span of a corporate job has shortened dramatically. And with teaching paying handsomely, its a path many are taking. Within a span of just three decades, the average age of the faculty body has halved.

At IIT-Delhi, said its Director Surendra Prasad, “There were 24 teachers below the age of 35 in 2005; in 2011, there are 43. In all, 123 faculty members on campus (a little more than 25%) are below 40 years. A typical teacher’s definition has changed: he, too, is from the Tweeting and Facebooking age. At IIT-Guwahati, for one, the average age of faculty on campus is 38; its 32 at the IIT-Madras campus.

“There has been a change in the culture on campus, just like there has been in society in general. The younger faculty are a lot more demanding of their students,” said M. S. Ananth, Director, IIT-Madras. Close to half the recently recruited teachers from the IIT system, many of whom went abroad to pursue a Ph.D. and came back to teach. Clearly faculty blocks are cleaved into to two blocks — the old timers who are holding the institutes flag and the younger lot that is aggressively into publishing and setting their own new reference points.

As IIM-Ahmedabad’s Dean (Faculty) Ajay Pandey noted, “Today you see a lot of youngsters in IIM campuses across the country. Their values are different but there isn’t a clash. Of the 90 faculty members here, about 20% are below the age of 35.”

Himanshu Rai joined IIM-Lucknow at 35. After graduating from IIM-Ahmedabad, he spent time at Tata Steel, but gave up the corporate profile to do something intelligent. “I don’t want a fancy car, a safe vehicle is just fine. I couldn’t devote much time to pursue my vision with a job like that; hence teaching. And I am happy here,” he said.

Source: The Times of India, April 24, 2011