Professor Arvind is no more. He was a distinguished alumnus of IIT Kanpur, having graduated from there in 1969. He was a Professor of Computer Science at MIT.
His death is a huge loss to the Computer Science community across the world and a personal loss to me.
The first time I heard of him was when I was still an under-graduate student at IIT Kanpur in 1985. There was a course on Computer Architecture, in which we were taught dataflow architecture (along with von neumann architecture, of course). Arvind had made major contributions in developing the concept.
Later, I would return from US to join the faculty of CSE at IIT Kanpur. Professor Arvind would visit the department almost every year. He belonged to Kanpur and had family there. And he would always make it a point to spend a couple of days in the department whenever he was in Kanpur. And he had a lot of discussions around CSE education.
I recall that once in 1999 or 2000, we specifically invited him to come to IIT Kanpur for a workshop on CSE curriculum design. I learnt at that time that MIT had a very lean curriculum and the number of compulsory CS courses to receive a Bachelors in CS was only 5 or 6 courses. I asked Arvind whether he considered courses such as Computer Networks, Databases, Compilers, Programming Languages as important. He said indeed they were important courses. But then why is MIT not having them in the curriculum. He replied that I was asking the wrong question. There are lots of important things in life and not everything is part of the curriculum. The right question to ask is whether heavens will fall if some student graduates without doing that course. And if you ask that question, the answer will be positive only for 5-6 courses. Everything else should be part of electives. We did that and I think even today, IIT Kanpur CSE curriculum is perhaps the most flexible in the country with least number of compulsory courses and maximum number of elective slots.
In another of our meeting, I asked him this: MIT must be receiving applications for admission to its MS/PhD programs from thousands of universities around the world. MIT wouldn't know the quality of these universities. How would they know if 3.8/4 CGPA is good, excellent, or average compared with a typical MIT student. He said that to judge the quality of a university, they would look at the transcript of the student and notice two things. How many courses were required for graduation. The more the number of courses, the poorer is the quality of education. Not always, but with very high correlation. He said that if we look at 40-lecture course as a typical course, MIT had 32 courses as graduation requirement. Next level programs in US had 34 courses, and even weaker programs had 36 courses. IITs had 42-45 courses, NITs had 45-50 courses (then), and technical universities had 50-55 courses for graduation. (It was then, now, most universities in India have reduced courses between 40 and 50.) And second, look at the type of courses. If there are many courses which teach skills like programming, or other technologies, there is too much of spoon feeding. These people may be good for industry but not good for research. Again, there are exceptions and one needs to be aware of those exceptions.
In a meeting in 2013 over dinner, he told me that MIT is intensely student-centric. He said most people believe that research institutions are faculty-centric but that is not true of MIT. Thankfully, the interests of students and faculty don't clash often and therefore, it doesn't matter much. But in few instances where there might be a divegence, the MIT leadership would give student success and student learning a greater focus than faculty autonomy. The specific issue that led to this discuss was that a faculty member had given a 'B' grade to all students in a course who got a zero in all assignments/exams and an 'A' grade to all those who received a non-zero marks in any component of the course. And he said that MIT would never allow this under the garb of faculty autonomy. Faculty had to give proper feedback to all students and assigning a B grade to all students with 0 marks violates that. Students' right to feedback is to be preferred over the instructor's autonomy.
I always looked forward to such discussions, which have shaped my thoughts as a faculty member, has made me a much better teacher and a human being. And since he visited CSE department at IIT Kanpur so often, his impact on the department has been huge. It cannot really be measured.
But alas, no more such discussions. But I will remember all his words of wisdom.
May his soul rest in peace.
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