AsianScientist (Nov. 13, 2014) – Earlier this year, Ashoka University admitted its first undergraduate class of 133 students. Located in Sonepat, approximately 25 kilometers from New Delhi in the National Capital Region (NCR), it is named after Emperor Ashoka who ruled over a large part of the Indian subcontinent over 2,200 years ago and is known to young and old alike from school history books.
Ashoka converted to Buddhism after consolidating his empire and dedicated his life to its spread across the subcontinent and beyond. To this end, among other things, he built several monuments dedicated to the Buddha, of which the famous Lion Capital has been widely used in government symbols, currency and elsewhere. The Ashoka Chakra, which appears on a number of edicts including the Lion Capital, found a place in independent India’s national flag.
Watch this space
Ashoka University is just one of the many private institutions to come up in the country over the past few years. However, I am quite certain that Ashoka will rise to the top of the charts in India within five years. If the government does not find new ways to mess with its functioning, I see the university as emerging among the best in Asia in less than a decade. After that, who knows?
There are at least three good reasons why I am betting big on Ashoka.
First, the way I see it, Ashoka is headed to the top in India because there is very little competition. This may seem a little unfair to the founders of Ashoka who have tried their best to do everything right in these early stages to build an institution that can truly honor the man whose name the university has borrowed. However, it is also true that an overwhelming majority of the nation’s 700 odd universities and 30,000 plus colleges offer poor quality education. Ergo, there is no stopping Ashoka’s rise.
Autonomy over authoritarianism
Second, Ashoka is likely to succeed where other Indian universities have failed in becoming a model of institutional autonomy. India’s colleges and universities are anything but autonomous, with damaging effects on higher education. Even prestigious public institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are not spared government intervention. For example, the appointment of directors or vice-chancellors has to be approved by the government.
Private institutions are worse. Nearly all of them are tightly ‘controlled’ by owners-investors (often in the singular) and strictly run as profit-making legal non-profit entities. The founders of even some of the ‘clean’ private institutions—including the IT czar Azim Premji who founded Azim Premji University in Bengaluru with a US$2 billion plus grant—have not been able to resist ‘controlling’ their institutions, appointing themselves and/or their family members to key governing and administrative positions of the university.
In contrast to other private universities, Ashoka represents a larger collective effort. So far, it counts 46 entrepreneurs—each of whom has put in over Rs. 1 crore (1 crore = 10 million)—as founders. The university’s board of trustees, the highest decision-making body, is currently made up of 17 members, each of whom has given a minimum of Rs 10 crores. However, irrespective of the amount contributed to the university, all members have one vote only.
The founders have tried to ensure from the outset that academics and professional administrators run the institution. Ashoka’s point man on all matters academic and more is the IIT-UPenn educated entrepreneur Dr. Pramath Sinha, the founding Dean of the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad. It took ISB less than ten years to make it to the top among India’s business schools, competing with the likes of much-older and established IIMs, and to gain international recognition as a top 50 business school. Sinha’s burden is to do for Ashoka what he did for ISB.
A first-class faculty
Third, for any university to do well, it must hire the most capable faculty it can recruit. Money may not buy love but, in combination with factors such as location and institutional prestige, can go a long way in attracting suitable faculty. As a private university which has not taken a rupee from the government, Ashoka can pay its faculty more than government-recommended salaries.
The university’s first few hires, whether regular faculty or well-known academics and public intellectuals like sociologist André Béteille (as Chancellor) and historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee (as Vice Chancellor), are a diverse lot, Indians and Westerners, with doctoral and post-doctoral research and/or teaching experience abroad. Good faculty begets better faculty. It is very likely that Ashoka will attract better faculty in the times to come.
The real question is not whether Ashoka will succeed but whether the ‘Ashoka model’ will inspire others to do more for India’s higher education.
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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: Ashoka University.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.
