I join JKLU: A small university with big aspirations

 As people following me on social media know, I have joined a small, young, private university in Jaipur as its next Vice Chancellor. The university is J K Lakshmipat University (JKLU), founded in 2011 by generous support from J K Organization. JKO, as any Indian would know is one of the oldest industrial house in India with businesses in diverse sectors and well known for its philanthropic activities.

When I announced my decision to seek retirement from IIT Kanpur and join JKLU, many of my friends were surprised. But I was itching to join a university which is open to doing things differently, one that had desire to achieve excellence, where the promoters were willing to invest in the future, and there will be enough autonomy to do all this. After having spent time at multiple institutions, it was becoming clear to me that I would have greater impact in private setting than public setting. I recall that of all the places I enjoyed my stint at LNMIIT Jaipur the most, and I believe that stint was the most impactful of all my leadership roles. Many friends who knew about my yearning for a new role tried to dissuade me. There aren't many such institutions in the country. But I didn't care. I didn't care if there were 100 such institutions or not. I only cared if there was one such institution. (And to be honest, I have come across several private institutions today who will meet this criteria. Higher education in India is changing.)

I had known about JKLU earlier. On 1st November, 2017, I had met Pramath Sinha and Asheesh Gupta regarding some other educational initiatives and in that meeting they told me about JKLU and wanted me to be advising the university. And so it started. From January 2018 to January 2019, I spent two days a month in most of the months at JKLU. I interacted with all the top leadership and faculty. Participated in their discussions on all academic matters. We had a faculty member from Olin College to help us in designing courses around project-based learning approach. (The Olin approach is very different from what colleges in India do in the name of project-based-learning.) The University was kind enough to send me to Olin in the summer of 2018 to learn the Olin way of education. I was part of faculty selections and we could recruit faculty from IITs and abroad. A Center for Communication and Critical Thinking was set up to support all academic programs as it was felt that these two skills are extremely important to future proof your education. We setup an office of Dean of R&D which supports faculty members when they submit sponsored research projects and want to file patents. We also created an incubation center. I was quite excited about my limited role and was extremely happy to see the pace at which things were changing. I knew that one day I would come back to this place for a full time role.

After joining PEC in 2019, I stopped going to JKLU. But they kept sending me their newsletter and I kept on learning of all their new initiatives. In 2019, they started their third major discipline - Design. (The first two were Engineering and Management.) They had recruited a truly exceptional faculty for Design and it could claim to provide education at par or better than the best design schools in India. There is a push to internationalization of education. We would like as many of our students to spend a semester in a good university abroad as possible and have a few agreements to support this. We have a very interesting program with Univ of Massachusetts, Amherst where the first year is done at JKLU and the second year at UMass with a very large scholarship provided by JK Organization to reduce the cost of education in US. We also support our students going to top Indian institutions, including IITs, for a semester exchange. 

We believe that the future lies with multi-disciplinarity. And as New Education Policy (NEP 2020) also mandates, we will be growing in other disciplines including basic sciences and liberal arts over the next few years.

We are tiny as the universities go. We do want to make an impact on the society and we understand that we need a critical mass to do that. We are growing in all three areas: Engineering, Management and Design. I am going to write a separate article on them soon. This one was just to introduce JKLU to my readers.