How have the Liberal Arts shaped the US—as a nation, as an economy and in its culture?

One of the most distinctive things about the US is the commitment to broad-based learning all the way through its educational system. Contrast it with a place like Europe or the UK, where students start specialising in the 9th or 10th grade. The American university system is the only place in the world where students consistently study more than one subject in their undergraduate career. So our people are aesthetically sensitive to a broader range of excellence because they are taught to think across disciplinary boundaries.

If you look at the stratum of American leadership in law, business, government and medicine, virtually all of them have undergraduate degrees from what is a Liberal Arts education. Even among law schools like Harvard or Yale, it (Liberal Arts) permeates a part of professional education.

What is Yale’s DNA for excellence?

Yale, like most other major universities, offers tenure. So after seven years, we make a decision about a faculty member and determine if we will give them a lifetime contract. And the criterion for that is that they have to be outstanding teachers, they have to engage in service within and beyond their department, and have to stand among the foremost leaders in their field in the world. When we put that judgement of trust in a faculty member, we want them to engage in the most creative and exciting work. They don’t need to show results in a year or two. And so we have a campus filled with people who are trying to answer the most interesting question they can think of.

How important is Liberal Arts in the Indian context?

There is a need in any nation for people to be trained beyond the high-school level in a range of skills. And I think India has shown itself to be capable of academic excellence in the areas where it has put its attention, like engineering. If the country puts its attention to having great institutions in the Humanities, Social Sciences and the Natural Sciences, it will lead to creativity which will benefit society as a whole.

What will it take for India to be in the world list of leading universities?

My sense is that India hasn’t had a tradition of combining research with training. Though the IITs draw students of enormous intellectual calibre, the faculties are engaged in research themselves. The key to having universities that are recognised by the world as places of excellence is to engage in supportive research and in research that will feel risky. This means allowing 20 faculty members to be working on projects of which four or five will work out and the others won’t. And I think if India is able to tolerate that degree of risk, it can build universities that are recognised by the world as great.