Chandrika Tandon almost never made it to the 187-year-old Madras Christian College. Her mother wanted to enroll her in a girl’s college and get her married soon after. But Chandrika had other ideas. She wanted to enroll on a new B.Com programme MCC had launched in the early 1970s. It took the principal of Holy Angels school in Chennai, where she had studied, visit her home to persuade her mother to allow Chandrika to enroll at the Sylvan co-ed campus of the college on the city’s outskirts.
Now, as a famous alumna of the college, Tandon is giving back to MCC: with a matching grant of $1 million to the college, in addition to the $ 1 million she donated earlier, she inaugurated the MCC Boyd Tandon School of Business here today, a school which bears her name as well as that of Alexander Boyd, a distinguished former principal of the college. Also present were KM Mammen, Chairman, of the MCC Association and Chairman of MRF and P Wilson, Principal of MCC.
In her address, Tandon emphasised that the B-school will be different in many ways. The B-school will be part of the larger MCC eco-system which is deeply involved in liberal arts and the sciences which the students can be part of. “We want to create holistic individuals who will be resilient so our approach will be interdisciplinary,” she said. Unbounded is the vision of the school, she added.
She said that the B-school students can also leverage the MRF Innovation Park that has been established on the MCC campus and the students will be required to form a company to understand a real-world situation: “Maybe 80 per cent may fail but they will learn valuable lessons along the way,” she added.
Social immersion is another area the B-school will emphasise to get the students to gain empathy and make them aware of what is happening in the areas of climate change, sustainability and deprivation.
The B-school will create a strong bridge between industry and the school and Tandon mentioned that in the six months since the school launched the programme, with 60 students, over 80 industry experts have come to talk to the students on a variety of subjects from AI to logistics. Students are already working part-time in companies to gain industry experience she pointed out, which is also a requirement of the B-school’s curricula. At least 75 per cent of practising managers are part of the academic council. As MCC Principal Wilson explained: “The problem-solving ability of students can be enhanced from multiple perspectives in the ecosystem that we have created.”