Yale to Focus on India

Yale University President Richard C. Levin says the elite American institution wants to grow ties with India to at least equal its ties with China.

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Yale University President Richard C. Levin says the elite American institution wants to grow ties with India to at least equal its ties with China.

“We were devoting pretty large resources to China,” said Mr. Levin, before joining a panel discussion on India at Citibank headquarters in New York City Tuesday evening.

In 2008 and going forward the Ivy League school in New Haven, Conn., is devoting a “much wider portion of intellectual activities” to India.

He said the number of students at Yale from China and India has doubled in the past 10 years but China still has more overall students (350 total) at Yale than India, which sends roughly 140 total graduate and undergraduate students of Yale’s 11,593 students.

“We hope to establish Yale as a leading, if not the leading, university in the U.S. for teaching of India,” he said.

Rival institutions such as Columbia University in New York, Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., and the University of Chicago have formidable resources and connections to India, he said.

Elihu Yale lived in India for nearly three decades in business and government starting in 1670 and donated goods to the Connecticut school, a gift that connected his name to the institution.

Mr. Levin said that, since 2008, Yale has added India specialists to faculty ranks in economics, political science, anthropology and other fields. It has expanded conferences, research collaborations with India-based institutions. And it plans to engage the Indian diaspora with programs and lectures in the U.S.

Part of that motivation may be to raise funds from the group of elite Yale alumni with ties to India, including Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria and Rakesh Mohan, former Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India who is now teaching at Yale (all three joined the panel discussion with Mr. Levin and Kapil Sibal, India’s education minister.)

The school says it has devoted $30 million to the initiative since 2008 and has raised $15 million more from donors already.

When pressed on whether Yale would open a campus in India, however, Mr. Levin demurred. The school is in talks to open an undergraduate liberal arts college in Singapore that will explore East and West intellectual traditions, plans that could be finalized by December. That school could be a beach head for Yale in Asia, he said, but “I don’t think we’re ready to start a university in India at present time.”