Indian University's Bumpy Entry Into the U.S.

Indian University's Bumpy Entry Into the U.S.
A private Indian university system planning to expand into the U.S. recently purchased a 170-acre, 11-building campus on Long Island but has canceled plans to acquire two campuses of the for-profit Art Institutes, one in Boston and one in New York City, after the deal came under scrutiny from state regulators in Massachusetts.

Aseem Chauhan, Amity University's chancellor, said the university had been "taken by surprise" by negative media attention it received after the Massachusetts attorney general issued a news release raising concerns about its proposed purchase of the New England Institute of Art (NEIA).

"We were given very little opportunity to defend ourselves or to project the correct picture," Chauhan said in written responses to questions. "The sentiments may have been against NEIA and against a transaction which would see the institution survive, but we suffered because of it. We did not see it as worthwhile to continue pursuing the transaction in this environment."

Amity had been in the process of purchasing NEIA as well as the Art Institute of New York City, two Art Institutes-branded campuses in the process of being shut down by their parent company, Education Management Corp.

Plans for the sale were outlined in broad terms in a joint letter NEIA and Amity sent to the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education in July. The Massachusetts department subsequently sent a Sept. 9 letter to the NEIA president, raising a series of specific questions about the proposed sale and seeking additional information about Amity and the Ritnand Balved Education Foundation, which Chauhan said is the sponsoring entity for Amity University. The letter from the department cites “significant gaps in the information that we have about this transaction and the resulting institution.”

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey subsequently weighed in, releasing a Sept. 22 letter she wrote to the state's Board of Higher Education urging it to hold a hearing “on the performance of NEIA's current teach-out and its new plan to outsource the remainder of its teach-out obligations to an unlicensed foreign entity.”

“Students who invested their time and hard-earned money into this school deserve the education they were promised by NEIA, not [to be] handed over to an unlicensed foreign corporation with no history of teaching art students in the United States,” Healey said in the accompanying press release.