First of all I would like to tell the parents and students that it's a misunderstanding of the term Liberal Arts because in that great scientific work by Copernicus on the revolutions of the spheres, he talks about mathematics and astronomy as liberal arts. So far as that in 1543, enough people were conscious that liberal arts always included the sciences and in the historical years, if you go back and look at the great institutions of liberal arts across the world, it always had sciences embedded. The term liberal arts itself emcompasses the basic sciences unless those are mixed together with humanities and social sciences, you don't get a holistic university. For that holistic experience, you have to have all of this in place. You have to add economics, social sciences, humanities and all of the sciences.

On the whole, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Mathematics, Computer science, and psychology, so all of these make a very exciting component of science but within the liberal arts university. Liberal arts has always meant: the arts and the sciences. In liberal arts, arts is not performing arts or painting  but arts as in humanities and social sciences so in its broader definition, historically, liberal arts have always included sciences.

Today, in Ashoka University, it had been making its way to being a complete circle. Now with the introduction of sciences we are there. Now, that holistic picture has emerged and Ashoka is what it is and of course, the sciences have been such a runaway success at Ashoka and  we have really outstanding departments.

Prof. Malabika Sarkar
Vice Chancellor, Ashoka University