Put the needs of AIT first

I remained formally attached to the Institute for more than seven years and have followed it ever since.

During those seven years I witnessed much progress and encouraging developments but also schemes to destroy and take over AIT and to oust the then president. The AIT, as a graduate school, remains to my mind a vital asset for sustainable development in Asia and a tool for the transfer of technological know-how to emerging nations and economies. The present organisation, with regional as well as international ownership of the Institute, is ideally designed to satisfy these needs and the Council, along with the president, bears the responsibility to carry it through. 

This past year the AIT campus was flooded, with widespread damage as a consequence. This misfortune has harmed the students and of course hit the AIT treasury hard.

There are now calls to undo the AIT as an inter-governmental organisation, to return to the former model. I fail to understand the motives. Such a move would render the Institute inoperable in the short run and the consequences would hit both faculty and students. In the medium term, financing of the Institute would become uncertain and its international reputation would suffer badly because of such inconsistency. My conclusion is that such moves may be governed by other interests than those of AIT.

I understand that the government has temporarily frozen its AIT grant because of the efforts to, again, change the Institute’s status, in fact to take a step backwards. I am convinced, however, that since it was once the initiative of the government to transform the AIT into an inter-governmental organisation, the grant freeze must be caused by understandable confusion when faced with the current coup attempt. I lend no credibility to those who point out that the IGO-initiative was taken while another political party was in power and that this would be behind the current freeze; such a theory is in fact an insult to the maturity of good governance and democracy in the kingdom.

I would like to take this opportunity to plead with the Council and the members of the former Board of Trustees to put the interests of AIT and its students first; thus to lend all their support to the implementation of the statutes of AIT as an inter-governmental organisation instead of disrupting it, and also to support the president and his team in the rehabilitation of the campus and the AIT reputation which may be again damaged.

Jan Axel Nordlander

Bangkok