Ashoka University

Ashoka University is a private research university located in Sonipat, India, providing a liberal education in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.

History
The institution was named after the Mauryan emperor Ashoka. It was conceived as an idea after Sanjeev Bikhchandani and Ashish Dhawan approached Pramath Raj Sinha, a former dean of the Indian School of Business, for his assistance in setting up the university. The project was code-named Project Nobel, referring to the founders' aspiration to produce future Nobel Prize laureates.

Initial discussions aimed to set up an institute of engineering and technology that could match the reputation of leading institutions in the field. Ashoka's founders signed a memorandum of understanding with the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science. The founders' list named 22 people, including Ashok Trivedi, Dilip Shanghvi, Nirmal Jain, Sanjeev Bikhchandani and Jerry Rao. The list later grew to 46.

Ashoka later expanded its focus to provide education in the liberal arts, combining instruction in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Trivedi fortified this decision by setting up the Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD) in partnership with the University of Michigan. In 2020, Ashoka University established the Trivedi School of Biosciences with virologist Shahid Jameel as the first director of the centre.

Campus
Ashoka University's 25 acre main campus is in the Rajiv Gandhi Education City in Sonipat, Haryana. It was designed by the American design firm Perkins Eastman led by architect Aaron Schwarz. In September 2021, the foundation stone was laid for a new 27-acre campus in Sonipat, expected to be operational by 2027, which will double the university's student capacity.

Governance
Ashoka University is funded entirely by donations, with no hierarchies present in the founding group in terms of decision-making. In addition to the chancellor, vice-chancellor and deans, Ashoka is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars. The council sets the university's academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring, and research.

The first chancellor was Andre Beteille, who served from 2014. The first vice-chancellor was Rudrangshu Mukherjee. In 2017 Beteille resigned, to be replaced by Mukherjee, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta was appointed vice-chancellor from July 2017. Mehta resigned in July 2019 and was replaced by Malabika Sarkar. Sarkar stepped down on 1 January 2023 and was replaced by Somak Raychaudhury.

Undergraduate programme
Ashoka University offers a multidisciplinary Undergraduate Programme. Students are not expected to declare their Major until the middle of the second year. Students enrolled at Ashoka University can choose their Major and Minor from various interdisciplinary options.

Young India Fellowship
The Young India Fellowship (YIF), offered as a Postgraduate Diploma in Liberal Studies. The cohort consists of 100 Fellows who come from diverse academic, professional, socio-economic, and geographical backgrounds. Within a year, they engage with diverse study, research and practice areas. The programme comprises eight terms of six weeks each, with up to four courses in each term. The Fellowship emphasizes writing, research, and experiential learning—in the form of an 8-month part-time Experiential Learning Module. The application for the fellowship has no age restriction since 2022

Masters programmes
Ashoka University offers graduate programmes in the form of Master's degree and Ph.D. programmes. Right now the master's degree programmes are offered in Economics, English, and Liberal Studies as well as Ashoka Scholars Programme. Other short term programmes offered are the Summer Research Programmes and Ashoka X (Ashoka's virtual education initiative).

Ph.D programme
Ashoka University offers Ph.D programmes in Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics, Mathematics, English, History, Physics, Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology.

Chief Minister's Good Governance Associates (CMGGA) programme
The CMGGA programme is a collaboration between the Government of Haryana and Ashoka University. The associates are trained, after which they are posted in each of the 22 districts of Haryana for 12 months. During their tenure, they represent the Chief Minister's Office and work closely with the Deputy Commissioner and district officials to drive changes at the highest and grassroots levels of the Government.

Admissions
The undergraduate admission procedure includes an application form, an on-spot essay, an interview, and an aptitude objective test named Ashoka Aptitude Test. It also accepts the SAT, one of the first universities in India to do so. Ashoka University is a Founding Member institution of the India Global Higher Education Alliance, which addresses how admissions policies among Indian and non-Indian institutions influence access and equity in higher education.

Reputation
In 2017, the university was awarded 'University of the Year' (in existence for less than 10 years) and recognised for 'Excellence in Internationalization,' at the 4th Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) Higher Education Excellence Awards 2017. In 2019, EducationWorld ranked Ashoka University 2nd in top 100 private universities in India. In September 2020, the Department of Economics was ranked number 1 in India out of 239 Institutions (and 31st in Asia out of 1539 institutions) according to Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) - the international database of economics research which covers 8198 institutions and 60355 registered authors worldwide. Further in 2020, the World Digital Awards 2020 was awarded to Ashoka for Organisational Excellence in Education. The university was also among 12 universities to get E-Learning Excellence for Academic Digitisation (E-LEAD) certification from QS IAUGE. In the same year, the Economics Department of the university ranked at number 1 (#1 of 239 institutions) in India, and in the top 12.5% in Asia (at #31 of 1539 institutions), according to the international database RePEc, which covers 8198 institutions and 60355 registered authors worldwide. Ashoka University secured the top spot in IIRF 2024 rankings for private universities.

Centres at Ashoka
The Ashoka Centre for Translation (ACT) functions under professors Rita Kothari and Arunava Sinha. The vision of the centre is to foster, nurture, and foreground India's multilingual ethos. The Ashoka Centre for Translation aims to engage in knowledge production and distribution through translation. Ashoka Centre for Well-Being (ACWB) was established in 2016. It provides free and confidential counselling and psychological support to students, staff and faculty. The centre aims to encourage good mental health by devising effective coping mechanisms through skill-building and awareness programmes. Koita Centre for Digital Health at Ashoka (KCDH-A) is an interdisciplinary Centre which offers academic and research programmes aimed at advancing and developing a fresh perspective on Digital Health. KCDH-A is a joint centre of the Trivedi School of Biosciences and the Department of Computer Science at Ashoka University, established with support from Koita Foundation in August 2023. It focuses on the convergence of healthcare, genomics, information technology, and artificial intelligence revolutions. The Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability (3CS) is an interdisciplinary centre that focuses on the effects of future climate change on our society, health, and environment. The Centre employs 28 faculty members from across 9 departments, including Gautam Menon, Iain Stewart, Srinath Raghvan, Sumana Roy, L.S. Shashidhara among many other notable names. It aims to spread awareness, foster research and advocacy on pertinent issues of climate change and sustainability.
 * Ashoka Centre for Translation
 * Ashoka Centre for Well-Being
 * Koita Centre for Digital Health at Ashoka (KCDH-A)
 * Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability


 * Centre for Economic Data and Analysis

The Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA) at Ashoka University is established by the Economics Department with Ashwini Deshpande serving as its Director. CEDA works to facilitate informed debate about economic and social developments in India. The centre also generates content in the form of blogs, research papers, policy briefs, and social and economic commentaries among other things. One of the primary aims of CEDA is to make data accessible to the concerned stakeholders. For this purpose, CEDA has created a public data repository along with an interactive visualization toolkit. This is extensively used by researchers, journalists, policymakers, students, and others. The InfoEdge Centre for Entrepreneurship aims to promote entrepreneurship among students. The centre is multidisciplinary in its approach and it holds events like Startup Ashoka, Ashoka Pillar Award, AIM Smart City Accelerator among others. The Centre for Interdisciplinary Archaeological Research (CIAR) at Ashoka University aims to bridge the gap between the sciences and archaeology. The faculty membership is spread across departments with names such as Nayanjot Lahiri, Kritika M. Garg, Shibani Bose, Alok Bhattacharya and Upinder Singh.
 * Centre for Entrepreneurship
 * Centre for Interdisciplinary Archaeological Research


 * Centre for Social and Behavior Change

Founded by Ashoka University and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the Centre for Social and Behavior Change (CSBC) drives behavioral change measures for people and communities in need. The center is led by Dr Pavan Mamidi and Dr Sharon Barnhardt. It aims to advance the science and practice of behavior changes, harnessing cross-disciplinary expertise in the areas of nutrition, sanitation, maternal health, family planning, and financial services. In 2019, the NITI Aayog partnered with CSBC and BMGF to institute an embedded Behavioral Insights Unit for India and introduce a novel paradigm of behaviorally-informed policy design and implementation in the country. Since then, CSBC has partnered with the state governments of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to set up Behavioral Insights Units in UP and Bihar. The Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy (CSIP) was instituted in 2016, through the efforts of Ingrid Srinath, who serves as the center's Director. It is the country's first academic center that aims to drive increased social impact through a strategic and robust model of philanthropy. Through its research and knowledge products, convening and facilitation opportunities, and leadership development programs, CSIP is cultivating a stronger civil society for a vibrant and equitable India. The Mother Teresa Fellowship, inaugurated in 2012, is now an integral part of the center. It is a values-based early career fellowship for Ashoka University graduates who want to develop their footing in the field of social impact. Established in 2015, the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) with Professor Madhavi Menon  as its director, aims to broaden the discourse that currently exists around gender and sexuality, through scholarship and activism. This spectrum includes issues of inequality, fantasy, desire, pleasure, identity, and politics that are key realities of our everyday lives. The Centre organizes several events such as a speaker series, student seminars, workshops, performances, and film screenings to initiate discussions around topics that are considered taboo. The Centre for Writing and Communication (CWC) is the largest centre at Ashoka University work to develop critical thinking, writing, and communication skills.
 * Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy
 * Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality
 * Centre for Writing and Communication


 * The Centre for the Creative and the Critical

The Centre’s purpose is to provide a forum in which to raise and address questions to do with both creative practice and critical argument by bringing together novelists, poets, translators, artists, scholars, filmmakers, journalists and publishers with different traditions and histories from all over the world. The Director of the Centre is Amit Chaudhuri, and its team includes Saikat Majumdar and Sumana Roy Established in 2019, the Science Policy Initiative (SPI) at Ashoka University aims to expedite the framing of evidence-based policies to address societal problems. Under the guidance of L.S. Shashidhara and Anjali Taneja, the centre is involved in creating the right environment for policy research and capability building through active support and expert leadership. One of the larger goals of SPI is to augment scientific research and innovation and to serve as a knowledge hub, initiating discussions on issues and defining the roadmap for the future with the help of evidence-based white papers and policy briefs along with partnerships and collaborations. The Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD) is a joint venture between the departments of Political Science and Computer Science at Ashoka University, with professors Gilles Verniers  and Sudheendra Hangal serving as its co-directors. TCPD aims at promoting data-driven research, policy work, and journalism on India's political life by producing and disseminating in open access scientifically collected and treated political data and also refining the quality of existing public data by developing web-based tools adapted to Indian data. The larger goal of TCPD is to become a reference source of political data and contribute to more empirical research, news coverage, and opinions about Indian politics.
 * Science Policy Initiative
 * Trivedi Centre for Political Data

Institutional collaborations
Ashoka University has a number of international institutional collaborations with university partners including UPenn, UMich, Yale, Duke, King's College London, HEC Paris, Sciences Po and many others.

The University of Cambridge and Ashoka University have signed a Memorandum of Understanding in recognition of their mutual interest in promoting and furthering academic links between the two institutions. The Office of Global Education and Strategic Programmes (GESP) at Ashoka University signed a MoU with National University of Singapore (NUS) in January 2022.

Ashoka University has also joined a consortium of five Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Bombay, IIT Jodhpur and IIT BHU, Varanasi) to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. The objective of this partnership is to establish a multiparty collaborative framework for long-term multi-institutional and international collaboration in educational and research fields. The research focus will be nanomaterials and nanotechnology, biotechnology, advanced sensors, photonics and cyber-physical systems including artificial intelligence. Ashoka University has further entered into a MoU with Max Healthcare Institute to initiate long-term, high-quality research collaborations. The collaboration aims to build a joint research program on genome analysis and data analysis that will include AI, ML and deep learning of various genetic and life-style diseases.

Arts and Humanities

 * Urvashi Butalia – feminist writer and publisher
 * Amit Chaudhuri – novelist
 * Navtej Johar – dancer, choreographer and yoga exponent
 * Rita Kothari – author and translator
 * Clancy Martin – philosopher
 * Saikat Majumdar – novelist
 * Janice Pariat – poet and writer
 * Sumana Roy – poet and writer
 * Arindam Chakrabarti -- philosopher

Social science

 * Pulapre Balakrishnan – economist
 * Amita Baviskar – environmental sociologist
 * Nayan Chanda – political scientist
 * Ashwini Deshpande – economist
 * Gopalkrishna Gandhi – politician; historian
 * Sunil Khilnani – political scientist
 * Nayanjot Lahiri – historian
 * Srinath Raghavan – historian
 * Upinder Singh – historian
 * Aparna Vaidik – historian
 * Ali Khan Mahmudabad - political scientist; historian

Science

 * Anurag Agrawal – medical scientist, pulmonologist
 * Rajendra Bhatia – mathematician
 * Alok Bhattacharya – parasitologist
 * Sudha Bhattacharya – parasitologist
 * Sourav Pal – theoretical chemist
 * L. S. Shashidhara – developmental biologist, geneticist

Controversies
In October 2016, a faculty member, Rajendran Narayanan, and two other employees resigned; it was alleged by the Faculty Council that they were asked to resign because they signed a petition on Kashmir, something the university denies. Narayanan believes he was targeted because he was also organising a Workers' Welfare Committee for all campus staff.

In March 2021, two faculty members, Pratap Bhanu Mehta (formerly the VC of the university) and Arvind Subramanian, resigned within days of each other, alleging a curbing of academic freedom in the university. Mehta has been an open advocate of liberalism, speaking openly about the 'Death of liberalism' under the Narendra Modi Government. He resigned from Ashoka University in March 2021, when trustees Pramath Raj Sinha and Ashish Dhawan are said to have told him that his "intellectual interventions were something they could no longer protect." This was followed by protests from students and faculty, who alleged that Mehta's views on the Modi administration might have drawn pressure internally, leading him to resign. But the Vice Chancellor denied that.

Sabyasachi Das Paper Controversy (2023)
In August 2023, Assistant Professor Sabyasachi Das of the university's Economics Department resigned following the university's decision to formally announce that it was distancing itself from a controversial paper by Das. His resignation was accepted after making extensive efforts to dissuade him.

Ashoka University's Vice Chancellor, Somak Raychaudhury, was cited by The Times of India stating that the research by Professor Das was perceived as reflecting the university's official stance. Raychaudhury clarified that the paper had not undergone a complete critical review process and had not been published in any accredited academic journal. As reported by The Free Press Journal, the VC elucidated that Ashoka University grants its faculty members the autonomy to engage in teaching and research within their fields of interest. It was pointed out that while the university does not directly oversee or moderate the research pursuits of its faculty and students, this ethos of academic freedom was extended to Professor Das as well. The Vice Chancellor underscored that Ashoka University's rise in less than a decade is attributed to its unwavering dedication to both research and pedagogical excellence.

Following his resignation, his colleague in the Economics Department, Professor Pulapre Balakrishnan, also resigned. The Economics Department and the Political Science Department came out with formal statements expressing their support for Das. These departments demanded that Das be reinstated.

According to a report from NDTV, Professor Balakrishnan conveyed in a letter addressed to Ashoka University's Chancellor, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, and the Chairperson of the Board of Trustees, Pramath Raj Sinha, that the university had never imposed any form of constraint on his classroom discussions, media writings, or public advocacy for rights. He further explained that his resignation was prompted by what he perceived as a significant lapse in judgment in the handling of the attention garnered by the controversial paper on social media. Professor Balakrishnan highlighted his experience of unbridled intellectual freedom during his eight-year tenure at the university, where he openly expressed his opinions in class, participated in street demonstrations, and contributed to media discussions without encountering any restrictions. He pointed out that Ashoka University had generously funded his latest book project, obviating the need for formal proposals or meetings. He disclosed that the publisher promptly approved the project upon its proposal and that the resultant study, a comprehensive examination of the nation's economic history, was a culmination of his professional journey, including a candid analysis of the present scenario. In the letter, Professor Balakrishnan conveyed his gratitude for the opportunities that the University provided to him. As a gesture of appreciation, he even offered his personal collection of books to augment the university's library.

The Departments of English and Creative Writing called for Das' reinstatement. The Department of Sociology and Anthropology also expressed solidarity with Das.