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This is an archive article published on May 16, 2022
Bigger campus, more student intake: Ashoka University’s expansion plan
The university’s construction started in 2012, and it was properly established in 2014. It currently has around 2,600 students, of which 80% are undergraduates. It has a 1.4 million square feet campus with around 200 faculty members. Speaking about its plans, Ashi
Both the accusations against Ashoka and the defence elide the fundamental problem with the “elite” private university that espouses liberal values and claims to foster critical thinking. (File)
Almost a decade old, Ashoka University has ambitious plans for the next 15 years as it embarks on what it calls its ‘Build Ashoka’ phase. As part of its plans, the university, based out of Sonepat, is gearing up to quadruple its existing campus area, double student enrolment in the next five years, and focus on the Sciences. As of now, Ashoka is mostly known for its Liberal Arts programmes.
The university’s construction started in 2012, and it was properly established in 2014. It currently has around 2,600 students, of which 80% are undergraduates. It has a 1.4 million square feet campus with around 200 faculty members. Speaking about its plans, Ashish Dhawan, founder and trustee of the university, said, “Ashoka has been a pioneer in multi-disciplinary education… It has shown a new education model which is better suited to 21st Century India where we teach students how to think critically, work across disciplines and love for learning etc …”
However, he said, the university was “far from becoming a truly world-class institution” which is why it was going from ‘Startup Ashoka’ phase to ‘Build Ashoka’ phase until 2035. The phase beyond that — from 2035 to 2050 — will be the ‘Institutionalise Ashoka’ phase, he said. “As part of the next phase, we plan to expand the campus to 6 million square feet – almost four times. In the next five years, we plan to double student body from 2,600 to 5,000. What took us 10 years, we will now do it in the next 5 (years). Apart from the scale-up, there are two-three priorities. One is an expansion in the Sciences. Ashoka started Sciences later, but now we have top people, about 8-10, who have joined Computer Science, Data Science, Technology etc,” said Dhawan.
“We announced School of Biomedical Sciences. We’ll work on Disease Biology, Information Biology, and Synthetic Biology… there’s no leading place for Bioscience in India. There are good institutes… but the number one spot is open…,” he said.
Dhawan said about 35% of Ashoka students majored in Sciences as of now. “It’s not diversification… It was always in the plans. We believe that to be multidisciplinary you have to cover all major disciplines. It’s more of an intensification. We will grow Humanities and Social Science also, but will grow the Sciences much faster especially from an infrastructural standpoint,” he said.
A major part of this focus on Science will be the building of a Science Park, which will include a 1,20,000 square feet Bioscience building, an innovation centre and a vivarium, among other things. Dhawan said these buildings will be ready by 2025.
“In Computer Science, we have a very different value proposition. Most people are doing traditional Computer Science. We think it is changing and its future is interdisciplinary because computing has become pervasive… The future of Computer Science is the intersection between
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that and other disciplines, like , Computational Biology, Computational Astrophysics or even Digital Humanities,” he said, adding that the School of Advanced computing will be announced later in the year.
The university also plans to increase the number of PhD students and start new centres. “We have a small PhD programme today — only 100 PhDs. So we will scale that exponentially in the next two years. In about five years, we hope to have at least 400-500 PhD students. We’re also starting a post-doctorate programme,” said Dhawan. It also plans to raise Rs 3,750 crore for ‘Build Ashoka’ phase in the next five years.
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