NEW DELHI, INDIA, November 17,2008: The renowned Yale University launched an India initiative with a corpus of $ 75 million to increase its academic ties with the country.
“The initiative will create new faculty positions on India; specific
courses and new curricula across arts, culture, religion and science,” Yale University President Richard C Levin said. Yale plans to triple the number of Indian professors to about 30.
A summary from Yale’s President follows:
“As many of you already know, Yale University’s historical connections to India are among the oldest of any Western university, dating back more than three centuries. It was at Yale in the late 1840s that Sanskrit was first taught in the Western hemisphere and that we have been continuously teaching Indian languages ever since. Today, a student at Yale can study not only Sanskrit, but also Hindi and Tamil.
“The earliest known Indian alumnus of Yale graduated in 1892 with a bachelor’s degree and returned to India where he worked in Bombay. Since then, the number of Indians to graduate from Yale has grown substantially and include such notable figures as Indra Nooyi, Yale School of Management Class of 1980, Chairman of the Board and CEO, PepsiCo; T.N. Srinivasan, Ph.D. Class of 1962, the Samuel C. Park, Jr. Professor of Economics, Yale University; Fareed Zakaria, Yale College Class of 1986, Editor of Newsweek International, and Rakesh Mohan, Yale College Class of 1971, the Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India.
“The rise of India since the 1990s into a nation of global economic and geo-political consequence compels Yale to provide a deep and rich curriculum covering all aspects of Indian civilization – its languages and literatures, religions, and history, as well as its politics, economics, and society. We also need to engage with the problems that confront contemporary India: equitable and sustainable economic development and public health.
“Today, Yale commits itself to the goal that India will have a permanent and prominent place in the teaching, scholarship, and the life of the institution, strengthening the relationship between the world’s two largest democracies.”