Kumar Bhattacharyya is one of the most influential but least-known manufacturing industry experts in the world. He made his mark as an academic entrepreneur, a concept he strongly advocates for South Africa’s cash-strapped universities.
“Education costs so much,” he says. “We can’t afford to do it unless it’s connected to the economy. It’s not sustainable and it’s not fair on the taxpayer.”
He says universities that disregard what he calls the real world are “toffee-nosed”.
Thirteen years ago a frustrated Bhattacharyya founded a unit at Warwick, one of the United Kingdom’s lesser-known universities, which had not been the engineering professor’s first choice. He had taken his plans to Birmingham University, only to be told that manufacturing was not the sort of thing with which an academic institution should dirty its hands.
“Students were assessed by the papers they published, rather than by their application of engineering in the marketplace, which was somehow deemed grubby,” Bhattacharyya once wrote. “You weren’t kosher unless you were a scientist or a pure engineer. This concept was crazy — like a medical school without patients.”
Warwick made Bhattacharyya professor of manufacturing systems, gave him an office in the engineering department and let him get on with forming an intriguing club of about 30 major manufacturing companies desperate for decent staff.
The deal was that the capitalists would put money into the university in return for research facilities and a conveyor belt of properly trained graduates. It’s been a success that he thinks could easily be copied by South Africa, with benefits for everyone involved.
Birmingham’s accountants must be kicking themselves today. His Warwick Manufacturing Group has yearly revenues of about £100-million and educates more than 5 000 post-graduates and managers a year through its worldwide network of operations, including about 100 master’s students from Eskom last year. It has won international renown with its philosophy of breaking down the barriers between academia and industry.
“My argument is that we need to train the cream of our youngsters to go into industry,” he says. “We don’t necessarily want more engineers; we want better-quality engineers. We need to get rid of the idea that applied research is second rate. I’m not saying that we don’t need pure research. We should support that and make it stronger. It’s not a question of either [one] or [the other]. It’s both.”
But aren’t some of those barriers between industry and the ivory tower a case of good fences making for good neighbours?
Not too worry, says Bhattacharyya. Peer review will soon winkle out any bias in favour of industrial giants.
“The greatest strength of science is its independence,” he says.
He does not suggest that every department in a university should be run along income-producing lines and is well aware that the requirement would kill off disciplines such as palaeoanthropology.
“A university is a very broad church,” he allows. “Our surplus has gone into funding other departments here. They can spend it on medieval French if they want to.”