The Harvard South Asia Institute (SAI) Workshop on the Liberal Arts in Higher Education is a forum for faculty, administrators, and leadership from universities across South Asia, the Middle East, and neighboring regions (Central Asia and East Asia) to explore ways in which universities may develop a liberal arts education program for undergraduate students, while fostering such objectives as sustainable development; social inclusion and peace; and cooperation across national boundaries among individuals, institutions, and governments. These goals are essential to addressing shared global challenges and to realizing opportunities to advance human well-being. Universities, as institutions that prepare future leadership of societies, have a unique role to play in the achievement of these goals, educating students as global citizens who can understand, value, and contribute to the common good.
The inaugural event of the Harvard SAI Liberal Arts Education Workshop will be held on August 19-20, 2017, at the Ismaili Centre in Dubai, with the aim of launching a consortium of stakeholders committed to a robust and vibrant future of liberal arts education. This workshop will allow Harvard SAI to initiate a multi-year engagement convening on an annual basis for collaboration, knowledge sharing and the exchange of ideas.
Eligibility
This workshop is available for university faculty, administrators, and leadership only. Please include your title, affiliation, and university email when you register.
Location: Dubai International Financial Centre, Dubai
Cost: FREE (The program will cover the costs of international travel, board, lodging and class materials. Visa costs are the responsibility of selected candidates.)
Application deadline: July1, 2017
Applications are open now—early submissions are encouraged.
Questions: Write to sainit@fas.harvard.edu (Subject line: SAI Crossroads Summer Program)
Faculty
Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School and Director of the South Asia Institute at Harvard University.
Karim R. Lakhani is Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, the Principal Investigator of the Crowd Innovation Lab and NASA Tournament Lab at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the faculty co-founder of the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative.
Emmerich Davies, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, will talk about India’s education policy at the American Center in New Delhi. The event is free to attend and open to the public – please register here.
Explore design thinking through the lens of an educator: Sanjli Gidwaney, Director, Design For Change, USA. Limited seats only, so be quick to register here: bit.ly/designthinkingconnected
Organizers: This conference is being conducted by HGSE South Asia Education Initiative, a student body at HGSE, aiming to build a bridge between students and faculty in Harvard and beyond with education practitioners and academics in South Asia.
This event is is co-sponsored by South Asia Institute.
The Akshaya Patra Foundation is the world’s largest NGO-directed school meal program, feeding 1.4 million children every day. To advance its vision that “No child in India will be deprived of education because of hunger”, the Foundation operates out of 22 locations throughout India, serving almost 11,000 schools. It has been nationally and internationally recognized for decreasing malnutrition, increasing school attendance and academic performance, and instilling post-graduation aspirations in participating students. Venkat is on an Eisenhower Fellowship, where he is exploring new NGO sustainability strategies, and gathering information to advance the development of a School of Social Innovation, which will be the first of its kind in India.
Cosponsored with the International Education Policy Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
Chair: Akshay Mangla, Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School
This paper provides a detailed account of how the system of teacher transfers operates in large parts of India. It presents evidence to suggest that teacher transfers form the bedrock of a patronage-based low-accountability school system. Politicians need teachers because teachers are politically powerful and can convincingly threaten them with electoral sabotage. This deters politicians from adopting strict teacher accountability policies. Knowing how powerful teachers can be in the collective, politicians attempt to control the behavior of individual teachers through patronage-based transfers. But reality is not as neat and clean, and it is difficult to point fingers at specific politicians, else the task of accountability might have been easier. This happens because of the profusion of middlemen, who promise to connect teachers to politicians. Middlemen sometimes fabricate instances of bribery, preying on informational asymmetries and an institutionalized belief in corruption. They generate a system of beliefs regarding corruption in transfers that becomes self-fulfilling. Grim as the situation may appear, the paper offers hope based upon the recent experience of two states in India.
Pramath Raj Sinha, Founding Dean of the Indian School of Business and a founder of Ashoka University
Chair: Akshay Mangla, Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School
“Everyone knows Indian Higher Education is a mess. Proposals for its transformation abound, but things continue to go from bad to worse. Despite the doom and gloom, there are several recent experiments that attempt to challenge the status quo and set an example. This talk is a first-hand account of building new and transforming existing higher education institutions in India.”
Women in India: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity
Keynote Speaker: Harleen Singh, Associate Professor of Literature, Women’s and Gender Studies, and South Asian Studies, Brandeis University
Closing speaker: Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School and Director of the Harvard South Asia Institute
Established in 2008, Educators for Teaching India (EFTI) is a group of secondary school educators dedicated to deepening our own knowledge of India and to exploring India’s role in school curricula. The organization includes teachers in public and private schools as well as educators in supporting academic institutions.
Sponsored by: Educators for Teaching India in conjunction with The Winsor School, Phillips Academy and The Groton School. For more information and to register visit: http://www.teachingindia.org/
Karthik Muralidharan, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of California, San Diego
Chair: Akshay Mangla, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Cosponsored with the Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics (Brown Watson Institute, Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and MIT Center for International Studies)
