Harvard example

IT™S THE WORLD™S MOST renowned and richest university with a humungous endowment corpus of $33 billion (Rs.204,600 crore). But recently, stories have surfaced in the US media detailing how the university™s management often trades admissions of the progeny of rich and powerful elites in developing countries ” especially China™s princelings (children of top communist party and government officials) ” for business development opportunities. œOf the 4,458 foreign students at Harvard this year, 722 come from China. When the once-powerful Bo Xilai was tried for corruption, his son Bo Guagua was at the Kennedy School. The daughter of Chinese leader Xi Jinping is now studying at Harvard under a pseudonym. Such party leaders as Jiang Zemin and Zhao Ziyang are said to have had relatives at Harvard, too, writes Diane Brady, a correspondent of Bloomburg Businessweek (February 11). Unsurprisingly, Harvard University had little trouble in obtaining the required clearances to start a Harvard Center Shanghai, where it offers œpricey business education to wealthy Chinese nationals. Nor is this top-ranked university quiescent in India. A Harvard Business School centre which offers top dollar executive education is running smoothly across an entire floor of the 5-star Taj Lands End Hotel in Mumbai. Moreover, Indian billionaires who plead poverty when asked to fund indigenous education institutions (or advertise in EW) have been successfully wooed to fund chairs in Harvard. Among them are Anand Mahindra (Rs.6 crore), Ratan Tata (Rs.30 crore) to fund a campus building, and Narayana Murthy (Rs.3.33 crore) to establish a Murty (sic) Classical Library of India. Harvard™s fundraising team of over a dozen, comprising hard-nosed marketing and finance professionals led by the varsity™s iron-fist-in-velvet-glove woman president Dr. Drew Faust ” skilled in the art of wooing and ego massaging the rich and famous ” provides an excellent example for managements of India™s perpetually funds-starved colleges and universities. Shared values With their talent for histrionics, proclivity for violence and intellectual infirmity, megastars of Indian cinema and sawdust caesars of Indian politics share many characteristics. One of them is amoral opportunism. A case in point is Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan™s cynical betrayal of Pepsico India, reminiscent of floor crossing and turn-coatism in Indian politics. For eight years from 2002-10 Bachchan sang praises of  Pepsi, the soft drink patented by the US-based FMCG multinational PepsiCo Inc (annual revenue: $ 66.4 billion or Rs.411,613 crore) on television and  print media, for which he was paid ” and  gleefully pocketed ” a massive sum aggregating Rs.24 crore. After his contract expired last month, he trashed Pepsi, reportedly because a little girl asked him why he was endorsing ˜poison™. One wonders why this Bollywood star ” revered in some circles as an intellectual notwithstanding his ready acceptance of roles of clown, hooligan and stalker in several blockbusters ” accorded such high value to the research capabilities of the little girl who posed the momentous question. Moreover, since the Rs.24 crore he accepted from PepsiCo was tainted, why hasn™t he returned it? Instead, so deep is his anguish…