EDUARDO GLANDT
DESIGNATION: Dean, School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania
ACADEMICS: Undergraduate degree from the University of Buenos Aires in 1968, PhD
from Penn in 1977, both in
chemical engineering
AREA: Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics
EDUARDO GLANDT
DESIGNATION: Dean, School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania
ACADEMICS: Undergraduate degree from the University of Buenos Aires in 1968, PhD from Penn in 1977, both in chemical engineering
AREA: Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics
EDU: What brings you to India?
Dean Eduardo Glandt: We want quality students, which we get here. A large fraction of our professors are from India. So, as the saying goes, there is no generosity but only self-interest—I am here for self-interest.
Q: You have a tie-up with the Young India Fellowship. Why did you choose to get into this collaboration?
A: It felt right, from the beginning. Penn profile is that of an extremely interdisciplinary campus. Among the Ivy League institutions, we have a record number of schools on one campus, perhaps because of our Quaker heritage and the Benjamin Franklin motto of merging, blending, melding the applied and the ornamental. This programme has exactly the same characteristics. There is cultural affinity, genetic affinity if you will, between the Young India Programme and Penn.
Q: Are you also considering other collaborations in India?
A: We have a number of person to person, professor to professor collaborations but no other institutional agreement.
Q: Recently, Penn instituted the Dean’s Medal for Distinguished Achievement, awarded to Mr Mukesh Ambani. He is planning to venture into higher education. Are you also in talks with him?
A: I see him every year, and I expect to see him again in Mumbai. He is always interested in what we are doing. I believe there may be a partnership one day. He is not interested in partnering with a single institution but with a number of them. However, I am not aware of the present status of any such collaborations. For us, the YIF is a reality as it is not in the planning stage. There are people here right now and that is exciting.
Q: Is the Foreign University’s Bill attractive in any way for you to consider coming to India?
Q: You say that the curriculum at UPenn is excruciatingly interdisciplinary. Why do you emphasise this approach?
A: Everyone knows that the most creative ideas come at the interfaces from fields. How you practice that is what makes the real difference. How you have the fortitude to not require students to take every single possible course. Not to say: “I took that course so thou shall take that course too”. To have your faculty develop the willpower to control themselves, and let the wisdom of the students guide a part of the curriculum. Get feedback from the students and listen to them. Penn also has a system called Responsibility Centre Management that makes these schools very independent financially and the tuition follows the students. The schools are budgetary cooperatives and are encouraged to pay attention to the courses that the students would like to take up.
Q: You also have this programme called Advancing Women in Engineering (AWE). What was the idea behind it?
A: I was walking into an event with a woman colleague about 12 years back, when she said, “I am sure that once again I am going to be the only woman in the room”. That touched something in me. It is important for women to have a healthy number of women co-workers. Diversity is something that we have always believed in. So, with the support of some women graduates, we started this programme to assist women of all age-groups in engineering. It helps young women in the age-group of 13-14 from junior high school all the way up to young faculty. We have a programme called Girls in Engineering Math and Science (GEMS), for junior high school. This is the age when their minds are made up to partake in the excitement of technology. We are working against a strong cultural current here, because young women often think that to study engineering you have to be a grease monkey and work under the hood of a car, which is not what technology is like today. We are a very unusual engineering school. For instance, we do not have civil engineering. It is all very lab-based cutting-edge technology.
Young incoming women students are invited to arrive a week earlier than the guys, get to meet the faculty, know the lay of the land and network among themselves so that when the guys are in, the women are a step ahead. This is to compensate for the so called cultural disadvantage, which they might have internalized and which we want to make sure is gone when they start here.
Q: Is it also a graduate who helped establish the Krishna P Singh Centre for nanotechnology?
A: Krishna is a mechanical engineering graduate from our school, and the Founder and CEO of Holtec International, the largest and only company in the US that handles nuclear fuel. He found and patented this technology and built a company around it. He is one of the overseers of our school and understands the pattern of nanotechnology—as the next wave of wealth and technology generation. He wants to help us be a leader in that area and has funded the building. This is a very facilities driven, facilities hungry field, and you are as good as your labs. It is only in clean labs that nano bases can be built—no vibrations, no dust and no magnetic fields. These are really cutting-edge, very expensive buildings to build and maintain.
Building devices, and prototyping and fabricating, set the core of engineering. When I was in high school and college I took a course called SHOP where you learnt to use machine tools. I remember I made an ashtray for my dad.
The shop of the 21st century is a clean room. You don’t make an ashtray, you make a chip. You look under the hood, not of your car, but your cell phone and you know how the world works. I think every other graduate, not just every engineer should have a look under the hood of their cell phone. What should an engineering institution be doing to excel? The glib answer would be—do what Penn is doing! I will try not to be too glib. We wrestle with that question all the time. I think it is a combination of things that are at odds many times. Giving the students a solid grounding in the fundamentals is what should come first. At the same time, they have to get a breadth, for which we have to keep 50 per cent of the course elective and 25 per cent from the social sciences and humanities. Pay tremendous attention to the social nature of engineering, where you work in teams, socialise and empower them to work in that way. Many things like ethics, innovation and ambition are learnt outside the curriculum.
And I would really miss out if I do not mention the importance of admissions. Although educators would say that what matters is what we design; what matters just as much is the raw material that comes in through the door. The day of the new admissions will be the one day when you affect your programme the most. Many times, we have to turn down somebody with perfect grades and perfect scores and instead admit somebody about whom we have made a qualitative judgement: a judgement that this person has more leadership potential, innovation potential and creativity.
Q: Would the same rules apply in India?
A: I think the same rules apply. I envy the depth of talent here. I envy the fact that technology and engineering stand taller here, as a considered choice of the students and that is why I am here.
Q: We have heard that you are often compared to Sean Connery and are known as one of the most charming men on campus. Does that help in administration? What advise would you give other deans?
A: I would rather be called Brad Pitt! (laughs). As I mentioned earlier, I have been lucky with the timing. One of course has to have awareness of the world and the pulse of the constituency. If I were to give just one advice to another dean, it would be to look at the world as a mosaic of constituencies where everybody is a constituency that needs to be thoughtfully cultivated. The list includes many who are a one person constituency. You have to specifically keep a meaningful relationship with all. That’s how the world works. Students are an important constituency for an educator, so are your colleagues, the administration, the parents, the graduates, the local police, the people who do the gardening and the dean of admissions.
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