S. Shankar Sastry has something in common with Olympic divers.
Poised high above a pool of budgetary cuts and institutional obstacles, Sastry — dean of the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley — recognizes that success for a barrier-busting joint initiative in China will be determined by his department’s ability to metaphorically tuck and rip into the future fabric of higher education.
“Education is changing,” Sastry said during an interview in his Orinda home. “Students want a more experiential classroom. They want high-quality free content on the web for people to study at their own pace. We like this model, and it’s our responsibility to change our classrooms to be more Platonic, less Socratic.”
Sastry hopes new technology to better enable such learning will be achieved through a new collaboration between UC and the Shanghai Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park, one of China’s leading industrial tech parks, where major global companies like DuPont, Sony, Honeywell, Marvell, HTC and VeriSilicon are developing and researching their products.
It’s no surprise Sastry was once involved in researching exactly how a diver learns the maneuvers that allow splash-less entry and win gold medals. He’s a theoretician, a man more prone to weave together general concepts across abstract subjects than to slice into an application and separate it from its core. This might explain how he managed to earn two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in one three-year period, a time frame he admits is “a little short.”
Since moving to Orinda in April 2011 — for the schools and community he wants his young son to enjoy in the years to come — he has had little time for the tennis he once played, or for the history books on his shelves. Instead, when he’s not engaged in budget-related meetings, Sastry has been consumed with his current passion — cyber security, and the university’s new partnership with Shanghai Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park.
“There are wireless devices being built into physical systems, so building them to be far more tolerant of failure and (resistant to) attacks is important. There are malcontents bent on doing harm, a curious mix of characters who find it attractive to destroy cyber systems,” he warns.
The global marketplace — not just in commerce, but in education — is simply an extension of the momentum created by students hungry for interconnected experiences.
“We started a minor involving developing countries, and this has proved to be most popular. It’s an incredibly idealistic student body. The students are curious about where and how they fit into the world.”
The international push from students and an inquiry from Shanghainese alumni coincided with Sastry’s reexamination of the department’s graduates. He noticed that many with bachelor’s degrees were seeking master-level courses in business and intellectual property, as well as group-oriented approaches to engineering challenges.
A Master of Engineering program was initiated, and the Capstone Project was developed to teach students how to work in teams, communicate effectively and bridge cultural and social gaps that might otherwise prevent innovation.
His criteria for building the engineering degree were stringent — anything new had to enrich students’ cultural experiences, be fully funded by external sources and create future resources for the UC engineering department.
The result is the collaboration with the Shanghai Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park.
The university gets a 50,000-square-foot building in Shanghai with a rent-free lease and an agreement that $10 million will be raised to finance research every year of the five-year agreement.
For their part, the contributing companies and educational institutions in Shanghai get an infusion of the best minds and a share of the resulting intellectual product in a short time span, especially when compared to the typical pace of corporate research and development.
“There are huge markets for these companies in China,” Sastry emphasizes, “not to mention the rest of Asia. There is a middle class that is capable of affording these things. Cisco, at the end of the day, wants to know how to capture more of the market.”
By Fall 2013, Sastry expects the Shanghai project will have a combination of Berkeley and adjunct Chinese faculty at work. The pool of applicants will be enormous, he predicts, based on the several hundred applications they currently receive for every position posted at Berkeley.
Unlike other U.S. academic institutions that have joined with Chinese government agencies or universities controlled by that nation’s Ministry of Education, Sastry says the Berkeley program is “free of baggage” and “able to call the shots in terms of who we admit.”
Ultimately, Sastry expects that Silicon Valley-style startups, and a third industrial revolution, will allow new technologies to pull society out of the current economic recession.
“I think it will be the students who will create the buzz to make this a success,” he said. “In five years, we won’t be in a recession and we will take stock. We will see what is working and decide whether to grow the activity further, or not.”
