Four months after it admitted its first batch of undergrad students, the wholly residential private Krea University in Sri City (Andhra Pradesh), with its unique School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences and IFMR-Graduate School of Business, is poised to reshape the contours of the country’s higher education landscape – Dilip Thakore 70 km from the port city of Chennai (formerly Madras), administrative capital of the southern state of Tamil Nadu (pop. 72 million), down the crowded National Highway 16 — currently experiencing extensive expansion repairs and traffic jams — across the TN-Andhra Pradesh border, an academic enterprise of great pith and moment is assuming shape and form in Sri City, a special economic zone established in the Chittoor district. The first batch of 113 students of the sui generis, mint new School of Interwoven Arts & Sciences (SIAS) of Krea University (KU, estb. 2018) — peninsular India’s first globally benchmarked liberal arts university — is finding its bearings and has settled down on the varsity’s clean and green campus. Four months after it admitted its first batch of undergrad students into SIAS, this wholly residential private university is poised to reshape the contours of the higher education landscape of southern India which hosts one-third of India’s 1.30 billion population. Its students (60 percent women) from 22 states across the country are well- settled into the leafy green, well-designed 40-acre campus with a built-up area of 344,000 sq.ft comprising a main academic block and three residential buildings to house male and women students and faculty residences — designed by Chennai’s reputed C.N. Rao Architects. Classes are running smoothly according to prescribed time tables. The blossoming of Krea (derived from the Sanskrit kriya, meaning intelligent action) University is a development of great significance in Indian higher education because it is the first Amercian Ivy League-style, liberal arts-focused university in peninsular India. Although it is well established that the southern states — Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana — are better educated and more advanced on most parameters of socio-economic development than the more populous Hindi heartland states of north India, governments and edupreneurs in these states have a history of promoting excellent institutions of professional education — engineering, medical, hospitality, pharmacy — which attract students from across the country and even from abroad. For instance 25 percent of all medical practitioners in Malaysia are graduates of the privately-promoted and managed Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE, estb. 1953). But curiously, until 2018, no southern education entrepreneur had stepped forward to promote a liberal arts institution of higher learning in the tradition of American Ivy League colleges and universities, down south. In this respect, the northern states, notably Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana have stolen a march over peninsular India. During the past decade, the globally benchmarked Flame University, Pune (estb. 2007), Ashoka University (estb. 2014) and O.P. Jindal Global University (2009) have quickly established reputations as excellent liberal arts varsities arguably superior to the best (St. Stephen’s, JNU etc) countrywide. In the…
