Celebrating 5 Years of TSLAS

PRAVAH 2026 was made possible by the generosity of everyone who gave their time, their thinking, and their presence to these conversations. To every participant who travelled to Patiala, prepared carefully for their sessions, and engaged with honesty and intellectual seriousness — this booklet exists because of you.

To the students who participated — not as passive observers but as genuine contributors to the conversation — we are particularly grateful. You reminded us, more than once, why this work matters.

To the faculty and staff of TSLAS who made the conference run: your effort was visible in every detail, and the warmth with which participants were received was a reflection of the community you have built.

To the volunteers who kept the days moving — managing rooms, solving problems, and doing the hundred small things that conferences require without being asked: thank you.

To the broader community of Thapar Institute — colleagues in other schools and departments, administrative staff, and the institution's leadership — for the support and the space to do this work: thank you.

Dr. Rajeev Ranjan Vederah, Chancellor, Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology — for his unwavering belief in the liberal arts and sciences as an integral part of Thapar Institute's identity. His leadership created the conditions in which TSLAS could take root and flourish.

Prof. Padmakumar Nair, Vice Chancellor — whose founding vision for TSLAS, that genuine inquiry begins with open-minded questioning, has shaped every dimension of the school's intellectual life. PRAVAH exists because he believed it should.

Prof. Ajay Batish, Pro Vice Chancellor — for his consistent support of TSLAS's academic programmes and for making the institutional resources available that made this conference possible.

Every conference has a theory of itself, even when that theory is never stated. The theory behind PRAVAH is that the most important questions in liberal arts and sciences education cannot be answered by any single institution, any single discipline, or any single generation of educators working in isolation.

The five conversations documented in this booklet did not begin on the morning of 27 February 2026. They began years earlier, in faculty meetings and curriculum committees, in the quiet anxiety of deans trying to justify their schools to sceptical administrators, in the offices of counsellors watching students choose between what they love and what they think they can afford to study.

What strikes a reader of these five chapters together is how consistently the same deeper question surfaces, regardless of the stated theme: what is education fundamentally for, and whether the institutions we have built are genuinely designed to accomplish it.

Read together, these five conversations are not a programme or a manifesto. They are a record of serious people taking seriously the possibility that the way we educate might need to be fundamentally reimagined — and that reimagining it is work worth doing.

There is a version of the artificial intelligence conversation in higher education that is, by now, familiar to the point of exhaustion. It moves through a predictable sequence: concern about plagiarism, followed by revised assessment policies, followed by the discovery that students are using AI tools regardless of policy, followed by a kind of institutional paralysis that mistakes caution for wisdom. The educators who gathered for the first PRAVAH 2026 dialogue were largely uninterested in that version of the conversation.

The questions that drove this session were not new, but AI makes them newly urgent. What is education actually for? What does a teacher do that cannot be replicated? What does a student need to learn that a machine cannot learn for them? These are questions that liberal arts and sciences educators have always had to answer — the instrumental justification for any subject that is not immediately vocational has always required a theory of human formation, not just human training. AI has simply raised the stakes of getting that theory right.

One recurring theme was the distinction between information and understanding. A language model can produce, on demand, a plausible essay on almost any topic. What it cannot do — or cannot yet do — is hold the genuine confusion of not knowing, sit with a difficult question without resolving it prematurely, or experience the specific kind of growth that comes from struggling with an idea over time.

The pedagogical implications are significant. If AI can produce competent output across most domains, then assessment practices that reward competent output need fundamental rethinking. What would it mean to assess genuine understanding rather than its simulation? Suggestions that emerged included oral examinations that probe reasoning in real time, project-based assessments that unfold over weeks and require documented reflection, and portfolio approaches that ask students to show not just what they produced but how their thinking changed.

A counsellor in the room raised a question that sharpened the entire conversation: what are we actually asking students to do when we give them an assignment? If the answer is produce a polished written product, then AI has already made that assignment obsolete. If the answer is develop the capacity to organise and communicate their own thinking, then the assignment still has a purpose — but only if it is designed in a way that requires genuine cognitive effort that cannot be outsourced.

The session ended, as the best conversations do, without a resolution — but with a clearer sense of what the real questions are. The arrival of AI in education is not primarily a technological problem. It is a clarifying pressure that makes visible what was always true: that the value of education cannot reside in the production of outputs that can be mechanically generated.

Interdisciplinarity has become one of the most invoked and least examined ideas in contemporary higher education. Every new curriculum framework claims it; few curricula actually deliver it. The PRAVAH 2026 dialogue on the new humanities began by trying to take the word seriously — to ask not whether interdisciplinarity is desirable, but what it actually requires, and why it is so much harder to achieve than it sounds.

The image that anchored much of the conversation was a tree. The roots are the disciplines — deep, specific, hard-won knowledge in a particular field. The leaves are the broad, integrative capacities that a liberal arts and sciences education is supposed to cultivate. Genuine interdisciplinarity is not the dilution of disciplinary knowledge; it is its extension into territory that no single discipline can map alone.

This has significant implications for curriculum design. The rush to produce 'interdisciplinary' programmes has, in many institutions, produced something closer to multidisciplinary programmes. The participants who had designed programmes that actually worked described a common feature: a requirement for genuine depth in at least one field before breadth was introduced.

Several participants argued that the most important frontier for the new humanities is epistemological: the question of whose knowledge counts. A genuinely new humanities would take seriously the intellectual traditions of non-Western cultures, not as objects of study but as sources of theory — frameworks for understanding the world that are as rigorous and as generative as the traditions that currently dominate the curriculum.

What emerges is a picture of interdisciplinarity that is more exacting and more honest than its cheerful rhetorical versions. It demands genuine depth in at least one field before genuine breadth becomes possible. A first-year student who changed her stream from science to history against the grain of expectation stands as a reminder: that small act of pedagogical trust may be as important to the future of the new humanities as any structural reform.

Global citizenship has become one of the more appealing concepts in contemporary higher education — invoked at convocations, embedded in mission statements, and built into curriculum frameworks with increasing regularity. Yet the frequency with which the term appears may be inversely proportional to the rigour with which it is examined.

For decades, the flow of knowledge has moved predominantly from the Global North to the Global South. To genuinely realise the idea of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — the world as one family — requires dismantling this asymmetry and building frameworks of mutual knowledge production. The deeper challenge is epistemic inclusion: the question of whose knowledge counts, who is permitted to theorize, and whose ways of understanding the world are treated as legitimate intellectual frameworks.

Alongside this epistemic challenge sits a more immediately pragmatic one: the growing instrumentalisation of education. As employability has become the dominant metric of educational value, the space for philosophical engagement with knowledge, art, and the human condition has narrowed considerably.

Institutions that have brought students from excluded backgrounds into higher education did not do so by lowering standards. They did so by taking seriously the structural barriers that had kept them out, and by building the specific kinds of support — financial, academic, social, psychological — that made participation genuinely possible.

What the conversation kept returning to was a distinction between inclusion as a policy position and inclusion as an institutional practice. Global citizenship, on this account, is not a curriculum objective. It is an institutional disposition.

The conversation about student well-being at PRAVAH 2026 began with a deceptively simple claim: students cannot learn well if they are not well. This is not a therapeutic observation. It is a pedagogical one, and it has implications for curriculum design, institutional architecture, and the professional formation of faculty that most institutions have not yet seriously reckoned with.

The evidence base is substantial and growing. A student who arrives at an 8 am lecture having skipped breakfast, slept five hours, and spent the previous evening anxious about examination performance is not a student who is in a position to learn, regardless of the quality of the teaching they receive.

The discussion moved quickly to the specific pressures of the transition into higher education. For students from smaller towns or first-generation university backgrounds, this transition carries additional weight: the social and cultural norms of university life may be genuinely unfamiliar, and the informal knowledge that helps students navigate institutional culture is often distributed very unequally.

Several practitioners described first-year transition programmes that had made measurable differences — not elaborate interventions, but small, consistent practices: regular check-ins with advisors who actually knew the students, peer mentoring systems, and explicit conversations in orientation about what university learning actually requires.

The examination system came in for sustained criticism. The current JEE-dominated model was described as an agricultural metaphor gone wrong: it ranks seeds by how quickly they reach a standard height, discards those that grow slowly, and calls the result academic achievement. The pressure this generates is not merely stressful; it is, in documented and tragic cases, lethal.

The institutions that are beginning to understand what it means to take the whole student seriously are not being soft. They are being accurate about what education actually requires. The tortoise, as one participant reminded the room with a smile, is the main character.

There is one question that haunts every liberal arts and sciences educator in India: where will this degree place me? Any honest reckoning with the future of liberal arts and sciences must begin here, with this question and with the complex web of history, culture, and financial anxiety from which it springs.

To dismiss the ROI question as philistine or shortsighted would be both intellectually dishonest and socially tone-deaf. For many Indian families, the decision to send a child to university represents a significant financial sacrifice. The anxiety that surrounds a liberal arts and sciences degree is, in this context, rational rather than philistine.

Several participants distinguished between two different kinds of ROI arguments. The first is a skills argument: liberal arts and sciences graduates develop communication, critical thinking, and adaptability that are increasingly valued by employers. The second is a network argument: the institutions and programmes that attract the most interesting students tend to produce graduates who are, regardless of what they studied, in a better position to find interesting work.

A historian trained to read the present through the long lens of the past brings to any organisation a quality of judgment that purely technical training rarely cultivates. A student who has learned to hold multiple frameworks simultaneously is — and this is what sophisticated employers are increasingly discovering — precisely the kind of person they most need.

The institutional response to the ROI question cannot simply be reassurance. Institutions that have navigated this well resist the temptation to promise specific placement outcomes; instead, they work to help students understand their own intellectual formation — to say, with confidence, not merely what they studied but what kind of thinker they have become.

What a liberal arts and sciences education offers is not a guaranteed destination but a genuine preparation for the unpredictability of the journey. The return, in other words, is not on the degree. It is on the education.

PRAVAH 2026 was made possible by the generosity of everyone who gave their time, their thinking, and their presence to these conversations. To every participant who travelled to Patiala, prepared carefully for their sessions, and engaged with honesty and intellectual seriousness — this booklet exists because of you.

To the students who participated — not as passive observers but as genuine contributors to the conversation — we are particularly grateful. You reminded us, more than once, why this work matters.

To the faculty and staff of TSLAS who made the conference run: your effort was visible in every detail, and the warmth with which participants were received was a reflection of the community you have built.

To the volunteers who kept the days moving — managing rooms, solving problems, and doing the hundred small things that conferences require without being asked: thank you.

To the broader community of Thapar Institute — colleagues in other schools and departments, administrative staff, and the institution's leadership — for the support and the space to do this work: thank you.