Ambedkar University offers liberal arts education ‘in truest sense’; 50% of teaching in the field

NEW DELHI: Shubham Rai graduated from school as a science student in 2018. He wanted to do something different but was not ready for the traditional BA honours route either. While scouting for alternatives, he came across Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi’s BA in Sustainable Urbanism. AUD is a young state university, launched in 2008. The course was an overlap of urban studies, humanities, social sciences, and planning and extensively interdisciplinary. To Rai, this was the best option. He then went on to pursue masters at AUD as well, earning an MA in Global Studies in 2023.

“Though I had to travel a lot, I knew this is what I wanted to pursue, something very dynamic,” he said. “The major learning in these courses is on the field and for a person studying social science, field work is most important. That is what makes AUD really different,” said Rai. He is now working at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) as a project consultant.

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Ambedkar University students say that the young institution is among the very few public universities providing liberal arts education in the truest sense. The university not only has interesting courses, but has a structure that enables students to choose from a diverse field of disciplines.

The interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary structure of the university had come about even before the changes in the curriculum introduced under the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP).

Anu Lather, vice-chancellor of the university, told Careers360, “While we say NEP brings in special features about the future of higher education in the country, we in the university have already been very futuristic. In the sense, we were highly interdisciplinary in nature right from the beginning – there is emphasis on continuous evaluation, which would be very rare in the country, except in terms of Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), Indian Institute of Management (IIM) and other centres of excellence who have been using this form of assessment. This keeps students on their toes as the course demands, in terms of assignments, minor projects, research and field visits.”

Ambedkar University: Course design

The university has interesting undergraduate and postgraduate courses. At the UG level, it offers the traditional humanities courses such as BA in political science, history, psychology, economics and mathematics; the unique ones include BA in sustainable urbanism, global studies, social sciences and law and politics.

Students are provided with an option to choose elective papers from other schools and courses. However, unlike in the other liberal arts universities, the science stream is missing.

“I feel that not introducing science subjects is an opportunity lost because in the future, social scientists as a standalone society will not work,” said Lather.

The other unique aspect of the undergraduate programme is the mandatory fieldwork and the component of research and dissertation.

Santosh Kumar Singh, dean, School of Liberal Studies, said, “What made me shift to AUD was the significant component of fieldwork in the course structure. Fieldwork carries credits at our university. This was exciting as a teacher. Over the years, I have seen students learn better when they study with the larger community. Our bachelors students have even gone abroad and presented papers.”

Singh teaches sociology at Ambedkar University and is also the dean of student services.

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Liberal arts PG course combination

The university’s different schools – Human Studies; Human Ecology; Culture and Creative Expressions; Design; Law, Governance and Citizenship – offer a host of interesting and multidisciplinary courses.

Rai explained: “AUD was the first to start the course on global studies, which talked about contemporary global issues and was extremely interdisciplinary. The focus of the school was on geopolitics and geo-economics, global environmental change, urbanisation, health and disease, science, technology and society, migration and diaspora, religion and secularism, global and literary humanities. It dealt with political science, economics and choices were diversified. It had an important component on environmental research and consultancy. This is what I worked on as my research,” said Rai.

Lather added that most courses started in the university are what the society needs.

“Ours is an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary [university] with openness to new ideas and innovative programmes. The School of Human Studies, for example, has psychology and has gender studies. In the School of Human Ecology, social sciences play a far more important role than in a typical life sciences programme in other universities. The school will talk about the inter connectedness between environment and human settlement. We have people from economics, sociology, management and people from the environment who are part of the school and undertake research,” she said.

Recently, the university started master’s programmes in criminology, public health, public policy and governance.

“Masters in Public Policy and Governance is a hit. The School of Public Health was started during COVID. Public health is the management of the public health system in the sector. Waste management, water management, air pollution where we are treating the symptoms. We called professionals from AIIMS [All India Institute of Medical Sciences], Safdarjung Hospital and even from Harvard through online consultation. Fifty percent of the teaching component is in the field. That is the best part of the university,” said Lather.

To ensure students have access to the field the university has also signed MOU with various government departments.

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Liberal arts: Theory and practice

Anita Cherian, dean, School of Culture and Creative Expressions, said, “It is the only school in the country which tries to integrate practice and theoretical approach.”

The school has four MA programmes – two “practice” and two “study”. Practice programmes are the visual art programme, where students are given training in the production of visual art material.

“Artists are trained in conceptual variants of art, it is not training in painting. It trains students to think conceptually and analytically about the work they are producing and also to incorporate into their work understanding of contemporary scenarios, technology and other aspects. While in literary art, creative writing programmes integrate conceptual analytics with the art of writing,”said Cherian.

The two study programmes at the school include performance studies and film studies. Now, PhD programmes have also been started in all four courses.

The school brings students of all four courses together for the foundation courses in contemporary critical theory. Graduates work as curators, visual artists and in the mainstream, as graphic content creators.

Another school, which offers Masters of Design (MDes) in Social Design, is again not just about learning design but it is the participatory idea of design.

Venugopal Maddipati, in-charge at the school, said, “Ours is the only design school in the country embedded in social science and humanities university. We have heard private universities are starting it now, but we predate it. Importantly, MDes in Social Design doesn’t exist anywhere in South Asia. Maryland College of Art had such a course.”

Students of this school work largely with various communities which again makes the structure a mix of theory and practical learning.

“The course has a participatory idea of design. There is a precedence of it outside India, mostly the Scandinavian model. The idea is to democratise the idea of design and lay emphasis on inclusion. It mostly caters to communities who have historically not been able to get the services of design. Our lot of work is involved with the community,” explained Maddipati.

Sowmya Lakshmi, who is pursuing a master’s in sociology, added, “The course structure has a good mix of theory as well as empirical papers. The faculty is always updating the readings so that students can engage with the everyday world with the ever changing realities. The classrooms host a wide range of discussions that allow students to open up their minds to other people’s opinions and help build a broader perspective.” Lakshmi graduated from Delhi University’s Kamala Nehru College (KNC), another public institution but radically different from AUD.

In AUD’s classes, the student strength is small and teaching is through workshops. But class sizes are increasing. For the study programmes under the School of Culture and Creative Expressions, it used to be 15 students, but is 25 now. For practice, it has risen from 12 to 20.

Being a state university, the fees range between Rs 28,000 and Rs 32,000 per year. Only management courses cost more.

Ambedkar University: Future plans

The vice chancellor said that she now wants to start a Chaudhary Charan Centre for Agribusiness and Rural Entrepreneurship.

“Our plan with this centre is to set up four different satellite centres in different areas and train farmers and the next generation. It will also mean connecting them to government machinery. Even students will also be able to learn from the community,” said Lather.