Dipak Jain still remembers the suspicion, more than two decades ago, when he was appointed as the first dean of Indian origin to run a leading US business school. A prominent alumnus commented “I can see the downside but not the upside”, while a rival for the post made disparaging remarks about his relative lack of experience.
Yet Jain’s leadership at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management from 2001 to 2009 heralded the start of a trend. Rao Unnava, the dean at the University of California, Davis Graduate School of Management, pulls out his phone and counts more than 80 US-based Indian deans and other senior academics on a WhatsApp group. “We share information and guidance, and have dinners together,” he says.
Unnava recalls that, after finishing at the elite Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, when he went on to study for his PhD at Ohio State University in the 1980s “they had never had an Indian”. By contrast, since the early 2000s, his generation of academics “has been coming of age”.