“They don’t realise this is something that adds to their life skills,” he says. The number of student sports, development and cultural clubs has also grown from 34 to nearly 55, with the campus “buzzing” on many evenings. Kamdar is also keen on providing plenty of opportunities for students to mingle outside the classroom.
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Before Covid put a stop to in-person events, he began a series of “Thank Goodness It’s Friday” game afternoons for staff and faculty to get together and have fun – and, importantly, “break silos”. Kamdar is also looking into more majors, including a major in design.īut the focus on academic rigour doesn’t mean Kamdar wants university life to be all work and no play. He aims to strengthen newly launched programmes, such as its master’s in economics and its PhD programme, as well as its soon-to-start master’s in psychology. With the university in a frenzy of pre-autumn planning, Kamdar is eyeing up more ways to boost FLAME’s academic offerings.
Finally, they complete a two-month internship at a company, which is graded and counts as course credit. They spend 10 days collecting primary data and conducting interviews, which they later turn into a dissertation. In their second year, they are required to complete a nine-month intensive project, working in small groups to study a nuance of India’s culture or history. At the end of their first year, they spend a month working for a non-profit organisation. Under Kamdar’s leadership, the university has embedded an analytical research component into every discipline.Īs part of their experience at the university, students must go through several “immersions”. His students, though, are required to demonstrate a solid foundation in research in order to graduate. The arrangement ensures that “unhappiness is curtailed”, with clear objectives for either path.
If you’re a great teacher and you do not want to publish and say, ‘I just want to teach’, we have a separate track for that,” he says, adding that the opposite is also true.įaculty who are highly research active – “publishing machines”, he laughs – can get a teaching waiver. “The incentives are very transparent and very much aligned. Given the emphasis on academic publications, how does he ensure his faculty maintain a balance between teaching and research? For the past three years, FLAME has been certified a “great place to work” by the India-based consultancy also called Great Place To Work, something that he says “speaks volumes about the culture of the university”.ĭuring his tenure, FLAME University’s publication output has also grown, more than quadrupling, reflecting his view that “we cannot just be knowledge disseminators, have to be knowledge creators, otherwise we’ll be teaching what is obsolete”. So far, his approach seems to be working. He has also reshaped the university leadership team, creating more positions for associate and assistant deans who would “take charge of particular facets of university growth”, something he believes empowers his faculty and staff. “I don’t only communicate – I over-communicate, probably my academics and staff colleagues would complain, but the aim is to talk.” Some might find him a bit talkative, he jokes. Four years on, he encourages academics to visit his office, believing that “culture is the secret sauce, and a happy workforce is a productive workforce”. Among the academics and throughout different departments, he tries to impart the feeling that “no one is big and no one is small”. When he stepped into his current role at FLAME, his first act was to meet with all of his faculty one-on-one. He emphasises, “we are not for profit…we’ll not do anything that will hurt student experience.”Ībove all, he says he is proud of creating “a culture of humility, of respect and accountability”, something that begins with himself. As FLAME has gotten bigger, Kamdar has been careful to increase faculty numbers before deciding how many more students it was able to take on. While he is pleased with the institution’s recent expansion, he is wary of pursuing growth at the cost of quality.