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Tuesday, March 19
The Indiana Daily Student

President McRobbie will visit Thailand

IU President Michael McRobbie will lead a delegation on a weeklong trip to Thailand starting March 30.

The trip aims to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the National Institute of Development Administration and renew a partnership agreement with the country’s top public research university.

“Indiana University’s academic and research connections to Thailand run especially deep and span more than six decades of strategic engagement, academic collaboration and institution building,” McRobbie said in an IU press release.

In 1966 IU helped establish NIDA, which is focused on graduate programs advancing national development. IU has more than 1,000 alumni affiliated with Thailand, and many of them are members of the Thailand Chapter of the IU Alumni Association.

“We are extremely pleased to be returning to Thailand to celebrate the success of NIDA and strengthen IU’s connections with the country’s top educational institutions that have led to student and faculty exchanges and other fruitful academic collaborations,” McRobbie said in the release. “We also look forward to reconnecting with the University’s many Thai alumni, who are serving as leaders in Thai business, education and government.”

As part of NIDA’s 50th anniversary celebration in Bangkok, McRobbie will deliver a keynote address at an academic conference on “NIDA’s Legacy: A Five-Decade Focus on Sustainable Development.”

The Kelley School of Business and School of Public and Environmental Affairs are partners of NIDA, which is a public graduate university with 10 graduate schools. IU’s Office of the Vice President for International Affairs manages a graduate exchange with NIDA, which is open to graduate students at all IU campuses.

Accompanied by IU Vice President for International Affairs David Zaret, McRobbie will also renew an agreement of friendship and cooperation with Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, which has yielded many scholarly and research exchanges.

In renewing this agreement, IU expects to build upon a number of successful faculty and student exchanges that have taken place between the two institutions since 1994, according to the release.

One of those exchanges, between Chulalongkorn University and IU’s College of Arts and Sciences, has resulted in CU providing a Thai language instructor to IU’s School of Global and International Studies, which houses the recently established Southeast Asian Studies Program.

IU’s partnership with Thailand dates back to 1948 and is one of the University’s oldest official international relationships.

IU aided the development of the Institute of Public Administration at Thammasat University in 1955, as well as 16 teacher colleges in Thailand in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these have expanded and are now four-year universities.

Taylor Telford

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