Inspirational India

The energy and ideas of partners in India inspired the York staff who visited last week.  Our plans for collaboration now range from joint seminars in bioengineering with IIT Delhi to a workshop on post-colonial scholarship in Britain and India with Delhi University.  Having a delegation of academics from widely different areas led to an interesting cross-fertilisation of ideas.  Staff from Computer Science, Electronics, Biology, Art History and English Literature forged a good working group, ably representing York and its work to leading universities and institutes in Delhi and Bangalore.

India gets a lot right in creating an environment for scholarship.  The campuses we visited were oases from the craziness of traffic and turmoil outside, and there is a great tradition of guest houses for visiting faculty – from within India or from around the world.  We can learn from this - if we take the time to measure the benefits, which are long-term.  Time spent on research leave or as a working visiting scholar on another campus, can yield huge advantages for scientific, scholarly advances.  Just having time to think is a difficult thing to achieve in the frenetic places that UK universities have become.

We also met legions of alumni in India, many from the world-famous Centre for Conservation Studies, housed in the historic King’s Manor in the centre of the city of York.  They were mainly students from the 1980s and 90s and now occupy interesting and senior positions in India’s heritage management industry, including the head of conservation at the Golden Temple in Amritsar.  It just goes to show what an inspiring time at university can lead to.

Hilary Layton, Director of Internationalisation