Blog: MIT Chancellor's presentation on April 23

April 23, 5:30 pm: Berger Auditorium: Eller College of Management University of Arizona, 1130 E. Helen Street

Chancellor Clay at Eller College immediately after his presentation. From Left to Right are: Dr. Rifat Latifi of the UA College of Medicine, Sarah Brown Smallhouse of the Thomas R. Brown Family Foundation, Chancellor Phillip Clay of MIt, and Dr. Amar Gupta, Thomas R. Brown Professor of Management and Technology.

The most touching characteristic about Phil L. Clay is his extreme sense of his humility. When I wrote to him in January 2009 inviting him to address my students, he promptly responded with:

　“I am honored by the invitation….”

Lesser mortals have responded to me after longer delays and with much less respect. The Chancellor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is truly different and unique in many ways.

I first met Phil Clay in 1995, soon after his promotion as Associate Provost of MIT for International Affairs. At that time, MIT was considering major initiatives in India, Brazil, and other countries, and I was spearheading some of these efforts. I found Professor Clay to be one of the rare visionaries with whom I could talk frankly on equal terms, both on-record and off-record. And, in subsequent years, he was always willing to accede to my requests to meet with select foreign delegations at short notice.

In 2004, the public outcry against outsourcing was at its peak. Presidential Candidate John Kerry had compared executives outsourcing tasks with Benedict Arnold, the famous traitor in US history.  At an event that I organized at MIT to discuss the topic of outsourcing, I had demonstrators, both inside and outside the lecture room. I requested these demonstrators to give me their short bios and contact information so that I could invite them to address the whole group in a formal way; not one of the demonstrators accepted this invitation.

The MIT course on outsourcing was announced 10 days after the beginning of the spring semester began at MIT. In less than a week, nearly 100 students dropped out of other courses in order to enroll for this course. This was despite my telling the class that we had no syllabus and had never taught this course before. By “we”, I include Professor Lester Thurow, former Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management. We invited Robert Reich, Labor Secretary in Clinton Administration, and other persons to present diverse viewpoints to the class. The course attracted wide attention in the press, and has been emulated by leading universities around the world. And it was partly this course that led to my coming to Arizona as the Thomas R. Professor of Management and Technology in the fall of 2004. I have taught this course once a year here at the University of Arizona, and the list of students has ranged from sophomores to faculty members, including a dean and vice provost. It is open to students from all colleges, departments, and programs, and is an example of the growing trend of cross disciplinary work related to globalization.

On April 23, 2009, Chancellor Clay addressed my follow-on course on International Management of Services. It highlights the notion of 24-Hour Knowledge Factory: you work in the US from 9 am to 5 pm, pass the work-in-progress to a colleague in Australia or China who works from 9 am to 5pm in that country and then passes the work to another colleague in Poland or Romania; the latter works in day time in that country and then passes the work back to you. You get up in the morning and feel that a magic fairy has worked hard while you were asleep!

The relevance of the above paradigm was enhanced recently after the World Health Organization and the American Cancer Society concluded that working at night -- the graveyard shift -- was a cause of breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men.

Innovative concepts like the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory are driven by visionaries. Two of them deserve special mention here.

The first visionary is Thomas R. Brown. He was a founder of the electronic giant, Burr-Brown Corporation, and brought Tucson to the global map in terms of electronics. He was educated at MIT, and was a true pioneer when he chose Tucson to be the epicenter of his new company. I used products from his company when I was an undergrad in India in the early seventies. The foundation named in his honor has made generous contributions to the University of Arizona and also to MIT.

The second visionary is Chancellor Phil Clay. Apart from his key management role at MIT, he is widely known for his work in U.S. housing policy and community-based development and has been involved in several studies that received national attention. Among other works, his publications include two books, Neighborhood Renewal: Middleclass Resettlement and Incumbent Upgrading in American Neighborhoods, and Neighborhood Politics and Planning.

If you do a search on the MIT website, you will read about Chancellor Clay serving as the gracious host to visiting royalty and heads of states of important countries. And you will also read about his recent pet project: Global MIT, a publicly accessible compendium of all MIT international and global activities in areas including research, education, internships and community service opportunities.

The title of Chancellor Clay’s talk was: Globalization of Education. His entire presentation can be viewed at the NEXT website soon, we expect to include a videotape of his lecture.


Amar Gupta
Thomas R. Brown Professor of Management and Technology
gupta@arizona.edu