academia speak
“Learning Can not be Confined to Class Rooms” The Shiv Nadar University aims to create a centre of excellence in higher education, which will be at par with premier education institutions across the world. Dr Nikhil Sinha, Founding Vice Chancellor, Shiv Nadar University, in an interaction with Dr Rajeshree Dutta Kumar and Pragya Gupta, shared his perspective on higher education in India. Excerpts:
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Can you give us details about the genesis of Shiv Nadar University? From the very beginning, our thought process has been into understanding the kind of education that can ‘deliver’ in 21st century in India. Till 2010, we were focusing on the type of university that we could build. Therefore, we visited the top educational institute of the world, not to duplicate their efforts, but to amalgamate best practices from global universities and to avoid pitfalls. Our University seeks to be a world-class institute, which would compete on merit with premier institutions of the world. The country needs many such institutes to cater to the large base of graduates and students passing out of school each year. Although India can be justifiably proud of having a robust education infrastructure, it has not uniformly kept in tune with the current Indian and global needs in higher education. Students who join Shiv Nadar University would not be the ones who are trying to win a rat race. We will not be churning out white collared workers for corporate houses. Students who come here will have a quest for knowledge, research and training.
How does the University plan its outreach in the coming years? We are going to set up a research-led multidisciplinary university in Uttar Pradesh, which will offer courses in engineering, social sciences, natural sciences, schools of business and other professional courses in due time. We will start admissions from this academic session itself and the total intake this year would be
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around 200-300 students. At the Shiv Nadar foundation, we have already brought social transformation into education. In addition, we have another emerging project of open school targeting a large number of urban students. We have a number of universities in India at every stretch but most of them do not meet global standards, which is a crucial requirement in today’s higher education scenario. Many institutes have come up in Noida, which offers good education, and where students can hope to be placed in good jobs after their studies. Several institutions like Amity and the India Institute of Planning and Management have now started establishing branches in tier-II cities, thereby providing good faculty and placements, which is helpful in meeting the increasing demand among students for quality education.
Shiv Nadar University treats knowledge in a holistic manner and creates opportunities for different kinds of interface between diverse disciplines. Could you tell us how this will be made effective? Everybody is talking about interdisciplinary education, but we find that hardly anybody is replicating it in their teaching and learning methods, because in most of the Universities, their faculty is established and you can’t force them in to this practice. There are issues, which we have already seen and we are trying to implement it in our universities. Bringing research in under graduate curriculum is another important focus for us. Early this year, we had two workshops in India with participation