From 50s to 30s, IIT faculty getting younger by the year

Updated on: Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Campuses across India are getting younger. In the 1980s, anyone who walked into a packed class at the Indian Institutes of Technology was a grey-haired, seemingly wise 60-year-old. Most of these professors had folded up their crazy work schedules in the corporate world and decided to settle down to a stress-free life on a quiet, leafy campus. Today, with the life-span of a corporate job shortening dramatically and with teaching paying handsomely, it’s a path several are taking.

The age gap between a faculty member and a student is closing. Records from IIT Kanpur show that between 1990 and 2010, the average age of freshly recruited teachers fell from the mid-50s to early 30s.

“At IIT-Delhi,” said its director Surendra Prasad, “there were 24 teachers below the age of 35 in 2005; in 2011, there are 43. In all, 123 faculty members on campus are aged below 40.”

At IIT-Guwahati, the average age of faculty on campus is 38; it’s 32 on the IIT-Madras campus. Along with age, a typical teacher’s definition has also changed: like those he teaches, he too is on Twitter and Facebook. “As in society, there has been a change in the culture on campus. The younger faculty members are a lot more demanding of their students,” said M S Ananth, director IIT-Madras.

Interestingly, close to half the recently recruited teachers hail from the IIT system; many of them went abroad to pursue a PhD and came back to teach.

Clearly, faculty blocks are cleaved into to two blocks - the old-timers who are the institute’s standard bearers and the younger lot that is aggressively into publishing and setting its own new reference points.

As IIM-Ahmedabad’s dean (faculty) Ajay Pandey noted, “Today you see a lot of youngsters on campus. Their values are different but there isn’t a clash.” Of the 90 faculty members here, about 20% are below the age of 35.

Himanshu Rai joined IIM-Lucknow at 35. After graduating from IIM-Ahmedabad, he spent time at Tata Steel, but gave up the corporate profile to do something “intelligent”. “I don’t want a fancy car; any safe vehicle is just fine. I could not devote much time to pursue my vision with a job like that; hence teaching. And I am happy here,” he said.

From 50s to 30s, IIT faculty getting younger by the year

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