The liberals arts are back

AT 8 A.M. ON A BALMY SPRING day in April, a motley bunch of executives boards a Mercedes bus at The Oberoi Hotel in central Delhi for Sonepat, a quiet town in Haryana, nearly 50 km away. Dressed in tees, slacks, sneakers, and baseball caps, they look like middle-aged holidaymakers. But don’t be deceived. These are heavy hitters, including the likes of Akhil Gupta, senior advisor to Blackstone and chairman of Blackstone India; Raamdeo Agrawal, joint managing director and promoter of brokerage Motilal Oswal; and Vikram Gandhi, a former senior investment banker from Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley. Chaperoning them are Ashish Dhawan (former senior MD, ChrysCapital), Vineet Gupta (MD, Jamboree Education), and Pramath Raj Sinha (MD, 9.9 Media)—three of the prime movers (and trustees) behind Ashoka University, coming up at Sonepat.

While handing out white hard hats as he prepares to take the visitors through the under-construction classrooms, faculty offices, and library, Sinha says their objective is to create a “Harvard or Cambridge” out of India. “The classes are going to be as smart as they can get anywhere in the world, with smart boards and all the necessary technology to enable the global faculty to engage meaningfully with the students.” By the time the hour-long campus walkabout, which includes a short presentation by Vineet Gupta and a snappy 10-minute lecture on the mind and behaviour by Kranti Saran, assistant professor of philosophy at Ashoka, is over, the visitors are impressed. On the way back toThe Oberoi, Dhawan, Gupta, and Sinha are peppered with questions on minute aspects of costs, faculty hires, admission processes, and publicity.

Ashoka University is a unique endeavour to build a liberal arts university in a country that fetes its engineering talent. Equally path-breaking is the way Ashoka is being funded: not through one massive endowment (think Shiv Nadar’s Rs 3,000 crore endowment for his eponymous education ventures, or Azim Premji’s Rs 8,000 crore through his foundation) or government grant, but through individual contributions. Ashoka has so far raised close to Rs 180 crore from 80 individuals, making it the most successful fundraising for a social project in India.

Eshwara Venkatesam, vice dean, who’s been selling Ashoka in India and abroad (Singapore, so far) along with Dhawan, says he’s been “overwhelmed and encouraged” by the response. The pitch is fairly straightforward: Let’s get together and create a new narrative in higher education in India that’ll inspire generations. That’s where the bus rides come in. Beginning February 2014, nearly every week, on a Saturday, Ashoka’s founders, by rotation, have been taking corporate biggies to the university’s construction site to get a firsthand look at what they are trying to achieve. The idea: getting them to contribute.

Ashoka is a great example of the other ‘CSR’—collective social responsibility—at work. Among India’s newly rich, education is a passionately debated topic. Most of this lot did well because a good education allowed them to ride the opportunities that came their way after the 1990s. Yet, for its size and demography, India has few world-class educational institutions. But how do wealthy individuals (rich enough to contribute a few crores, but not rich enough to start a university alone) help change that? Some, like IIT alumni, have made handsome donations to their universities, but that’s not the same as building new institutes.

That’s why the Ashoka model is a potential game changer. Though there is a Rs 2 crore threshold for becoming a founder, there is no lower floor for donors, creating a mechanism whereby many can participate in building not just a school or a college, but a university. Among those who have pitched in are Sanjeev Bikhchandani (founder, Naukri.com), Siddharth Yog (co-founder, The Xander Group), Puneet Dalmia (MD, Dalmia Cements), Dilip Shanghvi (MD, Sun Pharma), Jerry Rao (founder, Mphasis), and Deep Kalra (founder, MakeMyTrip.com).

While the model is still evolving, a donation of Rs 10 crore-plus gets you founder and member of board of trustees status. Earlier, that figure stood at Rs 5 crore, but as more and more people have come aboard, the bar has been raised. There’s also a board of trustees (essentially the dozen who have been around from Ashoka’s inception—people like Bikhchandani, Dhawan, and Sinha); and a council of advisors (influential donors such as Shanghvi or Kalra who came on board later). Going by current trends, by the time the university is fully built in 2018 in three phases, there should be between 45 and 50 founders (40 currently) and upwards of 150 donors.

FOR SOMEONE LIKE DHAWAN, the endeavour is similar, yet dissimilar to what he’s done in the past. He shot to fame in the late 1990s for identifying the BPO opportunity as a venture capitalist. By the time he left ChrysCapital, the private equity company he started in 1999, it was managing nearly $2 billion (Rs 12,032 crore) across five funds.

He’s pretty much doing the same now—tapping the wealthy to raise money that’ll get ploughed into a project. So far, it’s taken upwards of five conversations to get donors on board, and very often their wives have influenced the decision. Here, there are no IPOs or other forms of exits. “It is about creating a legacy that will outlast any of us. Imagine being remembered as the founder of the great institution called Ashoka University 100 to 200 years from now. We will not live to see that day, but a piece of history is what the donors will create today,” says Dhawan.

Take Bain Capital managing director Amit Chandra, who has sponsored students at the Young India Fellowship (YIF) programme since 2011 and is also part of the founders group at Ashoka. “If I have studied on scholarships and I am a beneficiary of the system, why not give it back through initiatives like Ashoka,” he says.

Though the majority of trustees are newbies in higher education—all have business backgrounds, except Sinha, who was the founding dean of the Indian School of Business—there’s enough evidence to show that Ashoka will succeed. Fundraising for phase I (Rs 140 crore) is over. In phases II and III, Ashoka will need another Rs 360 crore. “We have a visibility up to Rs 200 crore by the year end. The pace of donations will go up as we add more engines for fundraising like tapping into people outside India, including the U.S. We are hiring locally for this purpose,” says Dhawan. He hopes that as the physical infrastructure comes up and classes begin, more donors will queue up.

So far, all the important government clearances (such as land allocation and possession, and granting of university status) have come through, the faculty is falling into place, and student recruitment is on full swing. Teams from Ashoka have been visiting schools and meeting teachers, parents, and students. They have covered 54 cities, made over 350 presentations and reached out to nearly 31,000 students. Classes begin in August. The first batch will comprise 300 undergraduates and 200 postgraduates. The latter will all be drawn from the YIF, which Sinha used to run under a separate foundation, but will now get folded into Ashoka.

The four-year degree course will cost around Rs 5 lakh per year but in every batch 60% of the students will be on some form of scholarship. “We have built a [business] model where rich students will subsidise the not-so-rich,” says Dhawan. Equally, Ashoka is open to the idea of individuals funding scholarships.

But it’s not enough for just the university to click: The idea of Ashoka has to succeed as well. If not, it will remain a stray attempt at creating something new, the power of the idea unexploited. Like missionaries of yore, the founders need to evangelise the idea of collective social responsibility where a handful can rally a great many around a grand cause. All the trustees that Fortune India spoke to mentioned that once the university is up and running, they’d like to recede to advisory roles. Then it may be a good time to become minstrels.

SOMETIME IN 2007, Dhawan and Bikhchandani had begun discussing the idea of setting up a world-class liberal arts college in India. Around then, another bunch, Jamboree Education’s Vineet Gupta and his two friends, Ashish Gupta (COO, e-Valuserve) and Rakesh Jaggi (president at Schlumberger) began tossing around the idea of building a research-led university focussed on science and technology. They were together at IIT Delhi and wanted to start an institution that would “one day create Nobel laureates”, says Vineet Gupta.

The two parties knew each other very well: They were all from Delhi, roughly the same age, they’d run into one another at conferences and parties, and shared an easy camaraderie. They were all raised in the India of scarcity, came from middle-class homes, equipped themselves with top-notch degrees, made their money in the post-1990s boom as top professionals, and now wanted to give back. Think of them as comrades in arms with a shared background—and a shared sense of purpose.

In the course of figuring out what to do, these two groups began talking to Sinha. His background was nearly identical, he knew all of them personally, and his ISB experience was invaluable. Over lunch at The Oberoi they all decided to join forces and chase a common goal.

But why liberal arts?

The one reason that keeps echoing is that the engineer-MBA combine lacks a holistic perspective. This is a hot-button issue. While the nation’s brightest often end up becoming engineer-MBAs and are highly sought after by recruiters, there is increasingly a feeling that just a certain kind of thinking is driving decision making in companies. Remember, the majority of those behind Ashoka have exactly the degrees that they are questioning today. As Gupta says, “They [engineer-MBAs] simply cannot think critically or analyse matters beyond their knowledge of engineering or management.” Bhaskar Chakravorti, senior associate dean for international business and finance, The Fletcher School, Tufts University, adds that inclusive growth needs a broad liberal arts exposure rather than a narrow tech view. “India needs depth in both streams and money has to follow this,” says Chakravorti.

Focussing on liberal arts is a brave choice because jobs typically go to people with professional degrees (CAs, engineers, and MBAs). Sinha says his experience with the YIF programme shows that the position is changing both among students and well as recruiters. Since its inception in 2010-11, the batch has grown to 200 from 75. “Their success, whether in securing jobs in companies like Microsoft or Cipla, or in going for higher studies, shows that our little experiment was successful,” says Sinha. Historian, author, and editor Rudrangshu Mukherjee, who is coming on board as a faculty member, says, “The success of YIF convinced them to fast track things for the actual university.”

Indeed, when academicians such as sociologist Andre Beteille and Mukherjee were first told about the model, they were not sure how it would turn out. But the assurance of having a free hand in devising the course and the idea of working in an exclusive humanities and social studies institution brought them on board. “There was no prediction of how and what it would turn out to be. It was a gamble on their time, money, and effort. But hadn’t they done the same in their business ventures too?” says Beteille.

Bikhchandani agrees: “As entrepreneurs we are tuned to take risks. We have done it in our commercial ventures and we are doing the same with our social venture. When the world is chasing professional courses, we are talking liberal arts at an unprecedented scale.”

Some of the academics associated with Ashoka are Kaushik Basu, Ramachandra Guha, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta. Economists like Bhaskar Dutta have agreed to shift from University of Warwick to Ashoka. English professor, Professor Jonathan Gill Harris, from George Washington University is already a part of YIF and will join Ashoka to teach the undergrad courses.

Ashoka has also affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, Carleton College, University of Michigan, and Sciences Po, Paris. These institutions will enable faculty and student exchange programmes, apart from helping structure courses. Soon Oxford and Yale, and King’s College, London, will be partnering Ashoka. “For anyone to believe us, we have to demonstrate our seriousness from day one. There is no second chance,” says Sinha.

SUCCESSFUL UNIVERSITIES necessarily stand the test of time. For Ashoka, that means doing many things right. Once it expands to its full capacity of 4,000 students (phase III), it hopes to maintain the student-teacher ratio by attracting faculty from renowned colleges. The ratio it is targeting: 12 to 15 students per teacher. “The challenge will be to not buckle under the pressure of numbers. They need to cap the intake of students and balance it with adequate faculty,” says Beteille. Most of the private institutes crumble as they become big and unmanageable. An extortionist attitude creeps in and the faculty is stretched without bothering about quality. “It has a domino effect, bringing down the institute,” says Mukherjee.

Then, as philosophy professor Saran argues, there are institutes “that promise the moon” but cannot even ensure the basic freedom the faculty needs. At Ashoka the “founders have stuck to the initial terms and conditions they had laid out when they approached us”, he adds.

But ultimately, Ashoka’s success to a large extent will depend on the ability of the founders to selflessly diminish their roles. Sunil Kumar, dean of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, says that entrepreneurs in ventures such as Ashoka bring financial oversight and contribute as a sounding board. “But eventually they have to stop interfering and leave the running of the show to the academia and the staff.”

Ashoka’s trustees agree. “In the next two to three years, I assume our role will be more advisory and laying down broad guidelines rather than actively running the university,” says Dhawan.

SOON AFTER THE decision to start a liberal arts university was taken in 2008, the economy collapsed and fundraising came to a standstill. The trustees hunkered down, waiting for the environment to improve. From 2010, discussions picked up again and in the last year or so, things have moved at a frenetic pace.

As Sinha says, Ashoka is a passion. “All of us have our regular day jobs. So, if I am there to give visitors a tour of the campus, or Dhawan is present early morning to greet prospective donors, or Vineet is sweating himself with the workers, there is no gain apart from the satisfaction of seeing the institution being built.” This is their moon shot.