IIT faculty getting younger by the year

MUMBAI: Campuses across India are getting younger. Aggressive, single and idealistic were, for long, associated with students. Today, faculty shares the same space.

In the 1980s, anyone who walked into a packed class at the Indian Institutes of Technology was a grey-haired wise 60-year-old. Most had folded their crazy daily schedule and decided to settle on a leafy quiet campus in a job that didn’t come with unachievable targets of the corporate world.

Today, the age gap between a faculty and a student is closing. Recruitment records from the IIT-Kanpur show that between 1990 and 2010, the average age of freshly recruited teachers fell from mid-50 s to early-30 s (see box).

Now, for many the life span of a corporate job has shortened dramatically. And with teaching paying handsomely, it’s a path many are taking. Within a span of just three decades, the average age of the faculty body has halved.

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 (a little more than 25%) are below 40 years.’’

A typical teacher’s definition has changed: he, too, is from the Tweeting and Facebooking age. At IIT-Guwahati , for one, the average age of faculty on campus is 38; it’s 32 at the IIT-Madras campus.

‘‘There has been a change in the culture on campus, just like there has been in society in general. The younger faculty are a lot more demanding of their students,’’ said M S Ananth, director IIT-Madras. Close to half the recently recruited teachers from the IIT system, many of whom 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 holding the institutes flag and the younger lot that is aggressively into publishing and setting their own new reference points.

As IIM-Ahmedabad’s dean (faculty) Ajay Pandey noted, ‘‘today you see a lot of youngsters in IIM campuses across the country. 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, a safe vehicle is just fine. I couldn’t devote much time to pursue my vision with a job like that; hence teaching. And I am happy here,’’ he said.