A few years ago, I came upon archives of a 1950s-‘60s educational Contract Program between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur. (Thanks, University of Illinois Archives!) This collection provided much of the fodder for Chapter 3 of my dissertation. Examining it also caused me a fair bit of surprise, because I had not expected to see so much collaboration in a program where the U.S. gave aid to a developing country. These days, scholars usually write critiques of aid programs, highlighting how the U.S. often steamrolled over the needs and desires of other countries, despite its seeming benevolence in offering aid. Undoubtedly, Americans wanted certain outcomes from offering financial aid in this project too, but I was quite surprised at how administrators in the Illinois/IIT Contract Program really collaborated with Indian university administrators, government officials, and program participants/trainees.
In the section of Chapter 3 where I develop this idea, I start by pointing to the importance Indian university administrators placed on participants receiving “practical education.” What participants ended up receiving was considerably less than Indian administrators dreamed of, since they imagined their professors would be most able to train the next generation of Indian technical students if they had some experience working in actual U.S. manufacturing companies. However, I argue that this discontinuity between desired and achieved ends had more to do with the more privatized shape of American industry than with American administrators or Professors not prioritizing Indian interests. Rather, when I look at the memos, discussions, and decisions related to the Contract Program, I see remarkable evidence of American administrators and professors buying into the goals of providing for India and Indians the training they needed for their own situations (rather than just what the U.S. thought they should have.) As a consequence, the training that Indian participants received in the U.S. ended up often being valued and built upon in the future.
I wrote the section below to tease out two specific examples that build on the “practical education” element to show this larger trend I saw in the archival collection.
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As the emphasis on “practical education” opportunities highlights, even when Indian and American program officials did not see eye to eye on the best approaches for training program participants, both groups agreed on prioritizing India’s development in program training. For administrators, this prioritization often meant accommodating logistical problems associated with academic arrhythmia between American and Indian teaching schedules as well as the time that transit between India and the U.S. required.
In addition to the dilemma of asynchronous term schedules, participants frequently needed extensions on their approved residence in the United States. Learning often did not occur within the timeline the program laid out for participants. Academic advisors sometimes expected participants to do additional research before approving diplomas. Learning opportunities considered crucial often fell beyond the precise end of a university semester. Academic exams also did not always occur within a semester’s specific dates. On top of all these, students did not always progress in research and studies as quickly as they should have, putting them in the situation of needing more time to meet training expectations. For a myriad of reasons, requests for extension of stay in the U.S. thus frequently landed on the desks of Contract Program administrators, who regularly used the needs of Indian development to justify longer student stays.
Prodyot Banerjee’s extension request is a good example of this reasoning in action. Banerjee submitted his request in September 1963, which meant that administrators had spent the past six years working through the logistics of participant extensions. Still, Banerjee’s request engendered a long string of memos so that all decision-making parties could be included in the final decision. From September to November 1963, AID coordinators in the U.S and India, the university contract administrator in Illinois, the group leader in India, and Banerjee’s academic advisor in Madison sent memos back and forth to get approval for Banerjee to stay in the U.S. two extra months in order to finish his Master’s of Science degree at UW-Madison. AID coordinator Melton Barry explained that because the fall semester at University of Wisconsin lasted “until the very end of January this year…Prof. Banerjee will probably require some time in February to have his thesis examination after the final exams in the course work.”[1] When participants requested extensions due to an inability to finish research on time, administrators could respond quite skeptically, but Banerjee’s request related to institutional structures and timelines outside his control. Furthermore, administrators believed that fully completing the program of study - including the preparations for his thesis defense - would better prepare Banerjee for meeting the needs of his home institution. Group leader, Gilbert H. Fett, explained: “The updating which he is receiving at Madison in the area of Metallurgy will put new life into our department here in Kharagpur.”[2] When program administrators could justify accommodations according to the goals of U.S. development programs in India, they worked with participants to accommodate their individual needs.
Such priorities infused the work of academic advisors as well. For instance, several weeks into the Fall 1955 semester at Illinois, a certain A. K. Chaudhuri learned that one of his courses no longer served any purpose in improving the education offered at IIT-Kharagpur.[3] Chaudhuri had enrolled in a “Logical Design of the Digital Computer” class to prepare to train Indian students for the new digital computer IIT planned to purchase. Unfortunately, after investing several weeks in the coursework, he received word that his university’s administrators had decided not to purchase a digital computer, due to budget restrictions. Instead, students would work only with an analog computer. The Illinois digital computer course may have offered him the latest research in the field, but without having one on IIT premises, such a course was now impractical for Chaudhuri’s training! Furthermore, it was far too late in the semester to enroll in a more pertinent course. Chaudhuri’s academic advisor came to the rescue, however. He offered to conduct an individualize reading course with him over the following summer so that Chaudhuri could learn the general theories behind the “Analog Differential Analyser” and the “Application of Analog Computers to Engineering Problems.”[4] His professor understood that Chaudhuri’s education had a specific purpose - effectively training him to improve IIT’s education services - and achieving that goal seemed worth the additional work of offering an extra independent study in the summertime, the time when professors usually focus on their own research and writing projects.
As the Bannerjee and Chaudhuri cases show, American administrators and professors often were willing to go to considerable extra work and negotiate for more fiscal or chronological leeway in program administration so that participants received the most helpful education possible for meeting Indian educational development needs. In fact, because India’s developmental needs remained the central motivation for Contract Programs, decisions related to Indian participants’ time and experiences in the U.S. were made based on what administrators thought would best support those goals.
---------------[1] Melton R. Barry, Letter to James Leach [Asst. Coordinator for Engineering], September 20, 1963.
[2] Gilbert H. Fett, Letter to R.W. Jugenheimer [Illinois Campus Coordinator], September 25, 1963.
[3] A. K. Chaudhuri, Report, September, 23, 1955.
[4] Ibid.
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