Innovations in Higher Education

The silver lining of the dark cloud looming over India™s sliding higher education system is the emergence of private universities from the shadow and peripheries of the system UNAPLOLGETICALLY DESCRIBED AS THE œsick child of Indian education by the late unlamented Union HRD minister Arjun Singh, India™s government-dominated higher education system comprising a seemingly impressive 720 universities and 37,000 colleges, presents a bleak picture of obsolete curriculums, crumbling infrastructure, faculty shortages and funds constraints. Unsurprisingly, not even one of them is listed in the league tables of the world™s Top 200 universities published annually by the London-based Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education. Moreover, given India™s massive 1.2 billion population, the number of higher education institutions is grossly inadequate. They absorb a mere 25 percent of youth in this age group cf. the European average of 40-50 percent and over 80 percent in the US. The silver lining of this dark cloud looming over India™s sliding higher education system is the emergence of private universities from the shadow and peripheries of the system. In the new millennium, the number of private universities has grown to 189 currently. Among them Manipal, Amity, VIT, Shiv Nadar, and NIIT universities offer globally benchmarked undergrad education, even if not comparable postgrad and research programmes. However, it™s pertinent to note that almost all of India™s private universities were promoted to provide technical and professional engineering education, as a result of which liberal arts learning ” left to Central and state government universities dominated by confused Leftist ideologues ” has suffered grievously despite some of them (Bombay, Calcutta and Madras) being of more than 150 years vintage. This perhaps explains why even Delhi University (estb. 1922) ” India™s top-ranked varsity ” is ranked 421-430 and beyond 500 in the QS and THE World University Rankings respectively. Against this backdrop of a continuous decline in liberal arts education, reflected in the rise to high positions in government and academia of narrowly-qualified technocrats inadequately schooled in political science, philosophy and economics, the quality of governance and academic standards have suffered dangerously. Indeed, it™s arguable that the breakdown of the social contract, law and order and justice machinery, and cancerous spread of corruption within Indian society are outcomes of continuous neglect of liberal arts education. Therefore several new private initiatives to launch liberal arts universities and/or multi-disciplinary varsities with strong liberal arts schools, have aroused great hopes and expectation of a humanities learning renaissance. Among the new genre globally benchmarked liberal arts focused universities are Ashoka University, Kundli, Haryana (estb. 2014), O.P. Jindal University, Sonipat and the new Nalanda University, taking shape under the supervision of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen on the site of the ancient Nalanda University which in the 5th century and glory days of the subcontinent housed over 10,000 students from around the world. œOur goal is to establish Ashoka as India™s finest university and one of the best in the world, founded on the principles of liberal learning. By offering world-class liberal education in…