From Nalanda to Ashoka – A bid to revive India’s famed liberal arts tradition

Mr. Ashish Dhawan, who in 2014 spearheaded the launch of India’s first liberal arts university, Ashoka University, a philanthropic effort of over forty leaders in education and industry, addressed the Club on July 14 on “A second career in philanthropy”. He was introduced by Programme Chairman Manish Kejriwal who pointed out that he was a Yale graduate and went to business school in Boston. He soon became a leading figure in the investment management business, before giving it all up.

Mr. Dhawan, who cofounded and ran Chrysalis Capital, one of India’s leading private equity funds, recalled that as a schoolboy in Calcutta he had fallen in love with the idea of becoming a maths teacher. He was quickly disabused of the idea. But despite going to college in the US and becoming a leading figure in investment management, he retained the embers of that passion. He fulfilled his first goal of becoming an entrepreneur in his thirties and soon after he entered his forties he set off on his second career in a totally different field (the social sector). After deciding to work in the educational sector, he did a lot of reading and made many shocking discoveries.

For example, when the “Pisa” test was conducted in the comparatively more literate States of Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, they had finished second and third from the bottom, just above Kyrgyzstan. This meant that of the 250 million Indian children at school, 80% were either at Level 0 or Level 1 – they had failed and were several grades behind the grade they had reached. That at 80% equalled 200 million children failing the “Pisa” test.

“They will never have the opportunity that you and I had. We talk about being an economic super power but I assure you as a student of economics that we are going to fall into the classic middlein come trap if we do not fix our education crisis. We need a second freedom movement. We may have liberated ourselves from the British, but we need to liberate ourselves from ignorance.

“Skilling is good and we should invest in it because it is a near-term fix, but please remember that skilling is the ‘repair’ business and education is the ‘prepare’ business. You cannot change mindsets, you cannot get a plumber to read a manual in three months, you cannot teach certain values and character traits that get developed in school; so education is absolutely important.” Another discovery was that the government spent about Rs. 4 lakh crores on education. This was 10% of the budget and 3.5 % of the GDP. With another 2.5% of GDP spent by the private sector, 6% GDP was being spent on education.

But it was clear that the government was not innovative; philanthropists had to step in. He decided to focus on building a liberal arts university. Over lunch with a friend, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, the founder of naukri.com, they lamented many things, viz., that there was no true liberal arts university in India; that there was no Indian university in the top 200 in the world; that despite India being a 5,000- year-old civilization, eight out of the top ten South Asian historians sat either in the US or the UK; and that in a debate on Indian economic models, they had to look to Amartya Sen in Boston and Jagdish Bhagwati in New York.

There were no economists at Indian institutions. Arvind Panagariya, Arvind Subramanian, Raghuram Rajan, all of them came from American Universities. Mr. Dhawan and his friend agreed that the time to lament had gone and it was time to make things happen. They met Mr. Pramath Sinha, founding dean of the Indian School of Business who liked their idea and said he would join them. Soon there were many more who came forth to offer support. Their vision was to build India’s top university. “Not just a top liberal arts university, but India’s top university; so that India would have a university in the top 100 in the world and we can finally bring back the liberal arts tradition in India.”

The oldest university in the world, Nalanda, which was set up in the early 5th century AD, was a liberal arts university. It not only taught Buddhist religion and philosophy, but also subjects like literature, science, astronomy and so on. There were over 10,000 students at Nalanda in the 7th century AD, some from China and some from distant Turkey. Many of the ideas that travelled to the rest of Asia emanated from Nalanda. It made phenomenal contributions to the world of knowledge. But the university was destroyed by Bakhtiyar Khilji near the end of the 12th century AD.

“Nalanda died away and I would argue that that was when the intellectual component of our civilization died away. India’s leadership on the intellectual front died. We want a renaissance of that liberal arts tradition, of that intellectual culture in India once again,” said Mr. Dhawan. The goals were lofty. The first programme started out of a rented campus in Delhi. The founders were aware that it would cost a lot of money to set up a university and it would take a very long time to build credibility among academics. As a first step, they decided to offer “broad education” after college under the “Young India Fellowship Programme”.

Now in its fourth year, it has attracted about 3,500 applications for 200 seats. Some of the first students have gone on to Harvard and Stanford Business Schools; and they have even had a Rhodes Scholar. A licence to start the university was received in early 2014 and it was launched in mid- 2014. This was its second year as a university and there were 5,700 applications for 450 seats. In addition, there were 800 applications, mostly from the US, for 20 full-time additional faculty.

Mr. Dhawan sounded modest when he said, “We don’t think we have done anything remarkable; we just think that we have tapped into a latent demand. We think India has a golden opportunity where some of the brightest academics in the world are of Indian origin.” China has lured back its talent over the last ten to fifteen years and the Ashoka University model showed that it is not impossible to do it in India as well. With 800 people applying for 20 spots, they believed that they had barely scratched the surface.

The database of the American Economists’ Association showed that 2,000 of its 18,000 members were of Indian origin. Just as the IITs had created the IT revolution and the IIMs had led the management bandwagon, Ashoka University could play a game-changing role in creating a model for liberal arts universities in India. Several members asked questions about Ashoka University, the selection procedure for students, the course fees, faculty and so on. In response, he said that the goal was to price-discriminate.

Even when Ashoka brought down its cost of education, it would always remain expensive by Indian standards. But it offered scholarships to make it accessible to students from all over the country. At present it has students from 26 States. As for student selection, Mr. Dhawan said “we are looking for curious minds who love learning and want to explore; we would rather take a student who got 93% at the board and has read 50 books in the last year, as opposed to someone who got 97% but hasn’t read a book in the last two years.”

Touching on the economics of the university, the speaker said that in the West if someone spent $100 million at a university, that person would have a building named after him or her. But for the same sum it was possible to create a university in India. This was a rough estimate, but in the realm of possibility; and all of it with philanthropic capital. Many people had tried to dissuade him and Sanjeev when they put in the initial money and warned that nobody would contribute to a university in India. Yet they raised Rs. 400 crores in one year. Mr. Dhawan then referred to his other area of interest and said that his Central Square Foundation in Delhi made grants and did research and advocacy.

A lot of people in India wanted to do strategic philanthropy, to invest in schools and hospitals and things that were tangible. But it was the intangible things, those that were not seen and in which the ROI (return on investment) was not very clear, that were more important. Research bodies, think tanks and advocacy groups were perennially underfunded in India. Nor was anyone looking at research and advocacy in education. If one could make a change in this area, the results would be immense. For example, he had written a report on changing the way headmasters were selected in government schools. No one had worked in this area although this was a crucial area of change. There were hundreds of people doing research on Infosys; if only five persons did research on education…

“In philanthropy one of the things that I have learned is that the intangibles often give you more catalytic power, or more ROI, than the tangibles.” Mr. Dhawan said that rather than starting schools it was better to start teachers’ training or principals’ training programmes, or to work with the government on changing policy as these would have broader systemic impact. When the British left India the literacy rate was 12%. At that time, the singular focus of policy-makers was on access and equity, to build schools, hire teachers and admit children. India now has 1.5 million schools and ten million teachers.

There is 98% enrolment in primary schools. Therefore the access and equity problem has been solved. Now the big issue is quality – which is terrible. Technology can be a gamechanger. It is not a panacea but can provide interesting means of doing things. One of these is supplementary education. One of the mostwatched teachers is Salman Khan in the US who has over 500 million video views. He has created 4,000 videos in a closet beside his bedroom. Similarly, if teachers watch a five-minute video on how to take the next class, or download a lesson plan, it would be of tremendous help. Technology can also help in monitoring whether teachers are showing up or not and so on. Summing up his talk, Mr. Dhawan said that the problems in India were far more complex and could keep a person engaged for more than a lifetime. Many historians said that the golden age of India was the Gupta period. But that was simply not true.

“A lot of social problems that we thought were intractable… I think we now have a chance of actually getting them solved. When Bill Gates took on the cause of malaria, a million people had been dying of it, but no one had invested in a malaria vaccine. He says this has been the most amazing and rewarding work of his life, better than doing Microsoft.

“Good philanthropic work has changed a number of people and when they look back, it has actually been the most meaningful thing that they have ever done though they have been extremely successful in business, politics and other careers. “The golden age is now. The world has never been as exciting. Look at the energy amongst young people… they are going to make a tremendous difference. I think this is the best time to be alive,” Mr. Dhawan concluded.