York University’s Schulich School of Business is deepening its ties to India, signing a deal to build its own campus in Hyderabad, wrote the Toronto Star June 9.
The internationally ranked MBA school will team up with GMR Group, a massive infrastructure development firm that specializes in airports, energy and highways, to build the new facility.
“Indian firms are becoming very successful in the global marketing place and increasingly need graduates who understand the global environment,” Schulich’s dean, Dezsö Horváth, said in an interview. “Hyderabad is really emerging as a modern hub of India. This will be a seamless opportunity for faculty and students to move back and forth from Canada to India.”
Schulich already offers a joint master of business administration degree program with S.P. Jain Institute of Management Research in Mumbai.
Under current legislation, foreign schools are required to partner with an Indian sponsor. A foreign education institution bill, now before India’s parliament, would lift that restriction. “We are confident it will happen before the end of this calendar year,” Horváth said.
That means the new program in Hyderabad, expected to launch in September 2013, would be delivered entirely under the Schulich banner. The two-year program would initially be offered to 120 students. “It’s a great highlight of this school’s development,” Horváth said. “It’s a benchmark for our future.”
Schulich and GMR officials will sign the agreement following a reception at the Four Seasons hotel in Toronto on Thursday.
“Schulich has had a firm footing in India for some time now. They have proved their interest in India before anyone else,” V. Raghunathan, speaking for the GMR Group, said in an interview. “They have the reputation, the right mindset, and they are truly international in character.”
Schulich’s first graduates from Mumbai will receive their degrees Friday. Industrialist G.M. Rao, founder and chair of GMR Group, will also receive an honorary degree during the ceremony.
- Canadian universities have to work harder and longer to break past their historic links with the US and Europe, wrote columnist Haroon Siddiqui in the Toronto Star June 8. They’ve done so in China. That’s one reason we have 20,000 Chinese students here.
Our universities want to offer courses in India or open their campuses there. York University President Mamdouh Shoukri was to announce today that the Schulich School of Business is building the first full-fledged campus of a major, top-ranked international business school in India.
- That 2011 is the Year of India in Canada is a fact not lost on Canadian universities, many of which are ramping up efforts to play a larger part in serving India’s skyrocketing demand for higher education, wrote The Globe and Mail June 8.
A groundbreaking is scheduled for next month in the central city of Hyderabad on York University’s long-held plans to build the first “full-fledged” Canadian campus on Indian soil.
On Thursday, the University’s Schulich School of Business will sign a formal agreement with Indian developer GMR Group to establish facilities and residences for some 320 students, both Indian and international, to open in the fall of 2013. GMR is spending $25 million to build the campus as part of a $500 million commercial and community development near the city’s airport, but Schulich will operate the school.
“For Canadian schools to really be competitive, they must be part of the global competition and marketplace,” said Deszö Horváth, Schulich dean. “The money we are receiving from student fees…will be used to hire more faculty.”
- The Schulich School of Business at York University and GMR Group, one of the world’s leading infrastructure developers, will sign an official agreement tomorrow to build a Schulich campus in Hyderabad, India, wrote the Financial Post June 8. It will become the first full-fledged campus of a major, top-ranked international business school in India.
York prof Peter Victor wins Molson Prize for social science
A former lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick and a Toronto economist with a long-standing interest in environmental issues are this year’s winners of the Molson Prizes in, respectively, the arts and social sciences, wrote The Globe and Mail June 8.
Acadian poet/playwright/artist/filmmaker Herménégilde Chiasson was named the recipient of the $50,000 arts prize Thursday by the Canada Council for the Arts, while Peter Victor, an environmental studies professor at York University and founding president of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, took the social sciences honour, also worth $50,000.
The prizes, awarded by a five-member jury, are handed out annually to mark the lifetime achievements and ongoing contributions of two Canadians to the country’s intellectual life.
Deal maker brought Led Zeppelin and Chuck Berry to Toronto
Ed Glinert [LLB ’74] made a name for himself, even if wasn’t initially his own, wrote The Globe and Mail June 9, in an obituary of the graduate of York’s Osgoode Hall Law School.
Prior to becoming a prominent entertainment lawyer, the teenaged Glinert in 1967 co-founded the Toronto-based music-booking agency the Frederick Lewis Artist Placement Bureau, using his middle name (Lewis) and that of his partner to create the company’s fictitious figurehead – a figurehead presumably much older and more worldly than Glinert, who, at 18, was thought to be the youngest agent ever certified by the American Federation of Musicians.
But if Lewis’s existence was a ruse, the young Glinert’s own undertakings were burgeoning. He booked acts at the Old Rockpile club at the Masonic Temple, including the up-and-coming Led Zeppelin.
He brought Chuck Berry to the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall in 1970, and later that year helped put together the Festival Express, a train tour across Canada involving Buddy Guy, Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead that became the subject of a 2003 documentary film.
Perhaps the biggest show he worked on was the Rock ‘N’ Roll Revival festival at Toronto’s Varsity Stadium in 1969. In the age of Monterey, Woodstock and Altamont, large outdoor rock festivals were the rage, but nobody had ever booked the Beatles to such an event. The promoters of the Rock ‘N’ Roll Revival contacted the Apple offices in London, and although they failed in landing the Fab Four, they did get John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band – an ad hoc outfit (involving Yoko Ono and Eric Clapton) that performed on the Varsity Stadium bill along with Berry, the Doors and others.
It was Glinert who drew up the contracts for that concert. Many years later it was revealed that Lennon’s successful performance at Varsity Stadium had given him the confidence to quit the famous Liverpool-made band. Once that news came to be known, Glinert had himself another name: To friends and family, he became known as the Man Who Broke Up the Beatles.
Lewis died of a stroke in Mississauga on May 21 at the age of 63.
While attending the University of Toronto, Glinert worked as a live-music agent. He and his partner eventually sold the Frederick Lewis agency, with Glinert using his share to pay for his tuition at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School.
Glinert’s lasting legacy will be to the music publishing industry in Canada. "He was building value in this business for songs and for songwriting," says David Baskin, executive director of the Canadian Music Publishers Association. "We don’t have too many people with his degree of entrepreneurial knowledge or skill or drive in this business. We didn’t have one to spare."
Bank said no? Hedge funds fill loan void
With traditional lenders still avoiding risky borrowers in the wake of the financial crisis, hedge funds and other opportunistic investors are stepping into the void, wrote The New York Times June 9.
The lending activity is also stoking fears that speculative activities – like those that contributed to the crisis – are shifting from banks to loosely regulated firms that play by their own rules. While policy-makers are moving to increase capital and other standards for banks to prevent another disaster, hedge funds and the like are not subject to the same oversight.
If firms load up on debt and the market goes into a tailspin again, the shadow banking system could implode and threaten the entire economy.
"These institutions are essentially servicing a part of the market where banks are not lending," said Debarshi Nandy, a finance professor at York University’s [Schulich School of Business] in Toronto. "The million-dollar question is, Are we benefiting?"
Another worry is that funds will trade on non-public information they receive as lenders. A March study in The Journal of Financial Economics found a spike in investors betting against the shares of companies that took hedge fund loans. Businesses that borrow from banks did not experience the same activity, according to the authors, including Nandy.
One hundred years of healing at Women’s College Hospital
Dozens of portraits of women in starched white caps and crisp white dresses grace the walls of the Gladstone Hotel’s third-floor gallery, wrote The Globe and Mail June 8.
The images – from the pages of the Women’s College Hospital nursing school yearbooks – appear innocuous at first. However, Toronto artist Nina Levitt pointed out that nearly all of the white-clad women in the photographs also have white skin.
Levitt, who teaches visual arts at York University [Faculty of Fine Arts], was commissioned to create a body of work about the history of the hospital.
In searching through the hospital archives, she found that women of visible minorities appear to have been left out of the school’s yearbooks – even when some were clearly in class photographs taken in the same year. She found just four Asian women among the yearbook photographs.
Levitt said the hospital archivist told her the yearbooks were likely student-produced, which could help explain the anomaly. “It’s cliquey, so maybe some women were not part of the student body in the same way [as others] due to racism,” Levitt said.
The yearbook pages, taken from 1959 to 1971, speak to the ways both medicine and the world have changed since the hospital was founded 100 years ago. “These photographs really talk about a particular area, but to me they don’t reflect nursing today. Today it’s a profession that shows the diversity of our communities,” Levitt said.
Partners for Success welcomes new coordinator
Lana Kelly [BA Hons. ’95] is anticipating a busy summer, wrote Stirling EMC June 9.
The recently hired program coordinator at Community Partners For Success says she has a range of programs planned this summer that are all designed to "help build healthier children, families and communities by providing needed services."
A graduate of York University, Kelly holds her BA in sociology and English and is also a qualified Montessori teacher for ages three to six and six to nine. She has also worked with the public and separate school boards and says all her programs contain an educational component while appealing to the interests and abilities of the group. There are plans throughout the summer for outdoor activities and field trips as well as sessions of drama and music.
The mother of four daughters, Kelly is also a published author of parent resource material and says she has a passion for working with families, but "helping others in need [is the] absolute most rewarding career field."