The Promise of Interwoven Learning
A little under a year ago, a short article that I had written in mid 2020 titled “Krea University, Its Interwoven Model and the Implications for the Study of History” appeared on the blog of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), accessible at https://www.4sonline.org/krea-university-india/. In it, I had described what the hopes for Krea were in its bold new promise of a type of education that sought to transcend the interdisciplinary, and move into hitherto untrammelled territory in the Indian context, where there was the very real possibility of cross-irrigation in the imagining of curricula, and where three Divisions (Literature and the Arts, the Humanities and the Social Sciences, and Science) contained within themselves disciplines that would normally take on the lineaments of departments, such as the Biological Sciences, or Economics, or Psychology. There was tremendous excitement among those of us that had been hired to form the founding faculty of the newly minted School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences, even if some of us genially rolled our eyes at a term that also ran the risk of becoming a corporate buzzword and may indeed have even been engendered with that end in mind.
The effectuation of such a programme, however, was profoundly academic, and was predicated on the 19th century encapsulation of ‘liberal arts’ as a form of education, attributed apocryphally to the longest serving President of Harvard University, Charles Eliot (who held charge for a forty-year period, from 1869 to 1909), who held that every undergraduate student should learn a little bit of everything and a great deal of one thing. The roots of such thinking, however, were codified in ancient Greece, with the notion that the quadrivium (astronomy, geometry, mathematics (essentially arithmetic) and music), and the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), would produce a rounded scholar. While universities in the mediaeval period in Europe largely began as ecclesiastical places of learning, a situation that would see little change for half a millennium, the turn away from Trinitarian Christianity and the increasing insistence upon a broader approach to life (arguably driven by the Industrial Revolution and an increasingly restive globe under Empire, not least with the United States of America fired with its own revolutionary zeal against such overlordship), would drive the possibilities of a more modern kind of education. Liberal arts would question the centrality of the classics in education, contending that they should not dominate, as well as technical schools, which ran the risk of generating the kind of student that worked within a very narrow frame of reference, almost, as it were, within blinders, resulting in few, if not one, trick ponies.
India took its time warming to the idea of liberal arts. There had been lofty statements, not least by the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, about creating ‘scientific temper’ in education (a term that pointed much more to analytical and critical reasoning than to training in the sciences themselves), but apart from a few élite institutions, such as the first five Indian Institutes of Technology, the Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a few notable colleges such as St Stephen’s in Delhi, education largely remained in the province of rote learning. It was coincident with what is often seen as India’s second birth, that of the 1991 financial reforms under the oversight of then Finance Minister and later Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, that the possibilities of more rigorous curricula in the realm of the private university came into existence. A private medical school had already been started in 1953 in Manipal, a town in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, but it was only in the 1980s and 1990s that a major efflorescence came to pass, resulting in the Manipal Academy of Higher Education, vaunting such alumni as Satya Nadella, current Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, and Esha Gupta, a notable figure on the acting front in Bollywood.
Other institutions have come to the fore especially in the last two decades (even if some commenced activity earlier), Symbiosis and FLAME in Pune, Azim Premji in Bangalore, Shiv Nadar in Great Noida, Uttar Pradesh, near Delhi, and notably, Ashoka in Sonepat, Haryana, the last of which has swiftly gained a reputation for quality in the prosecution of its liberals arts programme, itself inspired by the Young India Fellowship, a far-sighted project that emanated from the minds that would contribute to the vision that would become Ashoka’s. Krea, emerging from the former Institute of Financial Management and Research (IFMR) founded in 1970, which has since folded into the university as its Graduate School of Business, traces its origins to 2016-17, and its inception to 2018-19, when a number of us were hired. Like Ashoka, Krea has received its seed funding from a number of individuals in the corporate world, rather than a single one, which leaves both universities more immune to the very real peril of “he who pays the piper calls the tune”. Krea hoped very much to be the kind of influence in the South that Ashoka was in the North of India. However, the unexpected outbreak of COVID in the first year, the greatest global catastrophe of our times, slowed the rate of growth that Krea would normally have hoped to enjoy.
Nonetheless, the university managed to hold largely in that period to the ideals underpinning its interwoven mission, including eight guiding principles that include “research-based learning”, “immersive learning”, “data analytics”, “historicity”, “ethics”, “interdisciplinary elements”, “writing intensiveness”, and the ability to conceive and respond to “unanswered questions”, all of which were seen as essential to dealing with an unpredictable world. Elemental to the overall curriculum was the first year, where students took all their classes together across three terms, in courses that diverged in form delightfully – “creative expression”, “writing & oral communication”, “mathematical reasoning”, “scientific reasoning”, “exploring the social and the historical/social analysis and historical immersion”, “philosophical perspectives across cultures”, “literature and arts”, “design thinking”, “data analysis”, “ethics”, and “introduction to topics in computer science”, with a final course to bring the cohort together at the very end of its undergraduate sojourn, “engaging with the environment”.
The excitement was palpable, the thought being that this range of options held its own and perhaps even outstripped the possibilities available in general education courses at other dyed in the wool liberal arts universities. Some of us good humouredly suggested that perhaps we should only run one year, as though it were finishing school, minus equestrian possibilities and lacrosse, with quidditch always a bridge too far. More seriously, however, it was a plan brimming with promise, the likes of which the country had seldom, if at all, encountered earlier. Then COVID happened with all of its associated social discontents, too familiar to recount here. It seems to me, however, that the place where Krea took its greatest hit was in terms of making full financial assistance available to the less privileged at the same level as it had before the pandemic. As such, the student demographic that resulted was less polychromatic in terms of economic background, but the ideal remains.
Given perhaps general unfamiliarity in India with the term ‘liberal arts’, which at least one notable jurist visiting the campus considered to include fine penmanship, an alternative term, “liberal education” has been bandied about particularly since the early years of the new millennium. Krea, like other private universities espousing the liberal arts in terms of its educational route, has a major challenge, which is perhaps shared even with the industrialised world. That challenge is the issue of utility, and is typically raised by parents. It is difficult in the cold light of material logic to afford easy answers about how history or literature count in the garnering of jobs beyond the academy or the civil services, or beyond the fact that students should have the right to choose to pursue what they love. Needless to say, the largest major at Krea is Economics, while the second is Psychology. Biology and Computer Science have traction as well, but other subjects have moderate to slim pickings. As the size of cohorts grow (our first had 113 students and we are slowly making our way towards 300 per year), all the majors should get more populated. The trends, however, seem to point disproportionately towards Economics, which, with no disrespect to that worthy subject, is a shame, because it does detract from what the possibilities of liberal arts and specifically, interwovenness might herald. Only time and circumstance can inform us about what the results of the curricular experiment that Krea has undertaken will be. That said, we continue to believe.
John Mathew
Associate Professor and Chair, Division of the Humanities and the Social Sciences,
Krea University,
Sri City, Andhra Pradesh – 517646
India