EducationWorld’s first cover story of 2020 celebrated the newly-promoted Krea University (KU), peninsular India’s first American Ivy league style liberal arts varsity sited in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh, a two-hour drive from Chennai.
KU’s south Indian promoter-trustees — perhaps miffed that India’s first Ivy League model private universities (Ashoka, Jindal Global, Bennett) have sprung up in the uncivilised north — have reportedly raised a massive Rs.750 crore endowment corpus for the first liberal arts centred university of the south.
This enterprise of great pith and moment greatly enthused your editor who although not quite in the pink, forthwith undertook a testing five-hour air and traffic-choked road journey to Sri City to write up an “over-generous endorsement” (according to a critic) cover feature highlighting the pains and attention to detail the KU management has taken to establish south India’s first liberal arts varsity. Although somewhat crass, in the Indian context it’s germane to declare that the entire expedition was funded — except for spartan on-campus board and lodging — by EW.
In the circumstances, your editors are shocked and dismayed that despite golden opinions showered on KU, we have not received any feedback, let alone appreciation, from any of the dozen-plus new varsity’s Oxford, Harvard-educated faculty, except from vice chancellor Dr. Sunder Ramaswamy to the effect that his hospitalised mother had appreciated our cover feature, and a complaint protesting a data error from the director of communications.
Perhaps in this age of bad manners and ingratitude, this is normative. However, almost all the stellar faculty interviewed for our cover story emphasised that teaching life skills and communication was a unique feature of KU’s specially designed interwoven arts and sciences curriculum. Surely, that includes elementary good manners. A poor start off the blocks.