Sankar Krishnan, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University, is in a happy place as he reels out statistics on the liberal arts university’s progress in four short years: 1,400 students on its campus at Sonepat, Haryana, a thriving under-graduate programme, students from 77 cities across India (over 20 per cent are from the South) as well as 10 countries around the world (over 50 per cent of the students are women), and nearly 80 residential faculty.

“We offer 20 under-graduate majors, 11 of which are pure and nine are inter-disciplinary — such as computer science and entrepreneurship; politics, philosophy and economics; and economics and finance. We have also been strengthening our pure and natural sciences courses, offering majors in physics, biology and maths,” explains Krishnan.

The university has also rolled out Masters and PhD programmes.

While the university can presently take up to 2,500 students, it plans to expand its campus by another 25 acres, which it recently acquired across the road.

“The new campus will be built over the next few years. Our overall growth plan will continue to be based on ensuring we maintain and improve quality, rather than be driven by numbers,” says Krishnan.

The corpus of Ashoka University for the initial phase, contributed by various donors, had touched ₹1,000 crore earlier this year. As it grows its campus, and research and PhD programmes over the next 5-10 years, the funds needed will be many times this number, says Krishnan.

“The funds raised so far have largely been used to meet the capital costs of our current campus and operational expenses.”

Krishnan also wants to spread the word among the student community and academicians of the benefits of a liberal arts education.

“In the Indian context, liberal arts to many means humanities, painting or arts. But we want to break that myth to include the sciences as well.”

When asked why liberal arts and sciences struck a chord with the Ashoka founders, Krishnan explains that India has world-class medical, engineering, business and law schools, but the schools in sciences and the arts are stuck in the pedagogy of the 1970s.

“We really need to make a change. Young people should not get siloed into one particular slot very early on — where they learn one thing like computer science or literature, and that’s all they do — instead of being able to bring multiple threads from multiple areas to fuse perspectives and solve problems.”

In the first year, students get to experience multiple foundation courses and get to think through what they want to opt for.

“It’s a process of discovery for the students. It’s very experiential, and project-, discussion- and team-based; it’s a full-year immersive programme,” says Krishnan.

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