Liberal Education and the Future of the University

This international conference co-organized by the BMS College of Engineering and India Platform, aims to examine the general predicament of liberal education and the future of the University in India. The primary concern of the conference is the need to create a holistic education for Science and Engineering students, which would include social science education that is relevant and stimulates rather than stifles the creativity and problem-solving capacities of students. It links this concern with the general concern on the state of the University in India. The context of the conference is two-fold. On the one hand is the disintegration of liberal education ideals in the West in general. This is accompanied by a very successful, yet extremely damaging model of the University generated in the United States during the cold war, which, as Russell Jacoby says, replaced the independent intellectual with the professional academic. On the other hand, in the Indian context social science... Read more

This international conference co-organized by the BMS College of Engineering and India Platform, aims to examine the general predicament of liberal education and the future of the University in India. The primary concern of the conference is the need to create a holistic education for Science and Engineering students, which would include social science education that is relevant and stimulates rather than stifles the creativity and problem-solving capacities of students. It links this concern with the general concern on the state of the University in India. The context of the conference is two-fold. On the one hand is the disintegration of liberal education ideals in the West in general. This is accompanied by a very successful, yet extremely damaging model of the University generated in the United States during the cold war, which, as Russell Jacoby says, replaced the independent intellectual with the professional academic. On the other hand, in the Indian context social sciences still operate within the confines within which they were first developed – that of colonialism. Figures like Gandhi and Tagore did attempt to develop indigenous models of education that were meant to challenge the colonial heritage. However, these have not met with much success. In such a scenario, how does the Indian University develop an organic model of liberal education which could rely on resources from within the Indian cultural context? And how do we escape the current strangle-hold that debates about ‘saffronisation’ have on the question of introducing Indian culture into higher education? The conference takes up these and allied questions and calls for papers from teachers, young researchers, Education policy-makers as well as scholars from the field of education. Please email your abstracts to Archana Bhat Kalahalla at archanabhat.maths@bmsce.ac.in Successful candidates will be notified by April 30, 2016