The Institute of Technology in Monterey, Mexico is creating a push for global specialization, outlining a strategy to recruit 100 elite scholars from first world institutions in more than a dozen academic fields.
The five-year plan is anticipated and animated by the long-term aspiration to attract greater academic talent to the developing world in the hope of significant new philanthropic assistance in private 30-campus operations.
The initial eight recruitments for the $ 100 million Faculty of Excellence initiative include nanotechnology, ethical capitalism, entrepreneurship and urban design experts, mostly from the United States.
Juan Pablo Mura, Rector of Higher Education at Tec, said: “What we are focusing on is attracting talented students and talented teachers and conducting high quality research that helps us solve challenges in Mexico and around the world. “
Tech is already one of the top universities in Latin America, with nearly 2,000 full-time academics and 6,000 assistants in 20 cities across Mexico. It has about 60,000 undergraduate and 8,000 graduate students.
One of Tec’s first faculty of excellence recruits is Raj Sisodia, a professor of global business at Babson College who is now serving as a professor of conscious enterprise at Tec. Sisodia, a local from India, co-founded the Whole Foods market grocery chain with John McKee, the creator of an effort known as Conscious Capitalism, which aims to help corporate leaders understand that their operations are better and they treat their employees well.
He saw great potential for entrepreneurship at Tec, which has 500,000 alumni and 500 trustees, many of whom are business leaders committed to the conscious capitalist ideology. About 100 other tech professors have said they are willing to take part, which includes creating a conscious business juvenile, he said.
Others who have joined the institute include Mark Madou, Irwin of the University of California, Berkeley, Professor of Nanoengineering at Tech, and Cipriano Santos, a private sector expert in the application of mathematics to business challenges.
Most of the other primary appointments are taking the position of visiting professor.
From the outside, the overall initiative seems ambitious, says one expert, Gerardo Blanco, a Mexican who is now an associate professor of higher education at Boston College. The main challenge for the Faculty of Excellence initiative, Blanco said, would include maintaining the level of funding needed to keep world-class scholars and tarnishing Mexico’s reputation for organized crime and violence linked to drug cartels.
Because of these barriers, Blanco said, many new recruits may leave Tec shortly afterwards, or they may use Tec’s offer to take higher pay from their current organization. “When you attract someone who is very high-profile,” he said, “you have to keep them for a while to get some return on investment.”
Sisodia, however, was giving every indication that Tech is a long-term partner. He is in the middle of a two-year vacation from Babson’s absence and will ultimately face a decision on whether to stay on his full five-year offer at Tech, for which he will have to spend only 10 weeks a year in Mexico.
“The only difference is that I will stay,” Sisodia said. “Their commitment to staying on the edge of business education and integrating social and planetary perspectives with that education is much stronger than I have seen anywhere else.”
