Dr Nikhil Govind is the Head of the Manipal Centre for Humanities (MCH), Manipal Academy of Higher Education. He did his Bachelors from St Stephens College, Delhi and then went on to do a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. He is one of the most prominent scholars of Indian literature and culture. His books include Between Love and Freedom: The Revolutionary in the Hindi Novel (Routledge, 2014), Inlays of Subjectivity: Affect and Action in Modern IndianLiterature (Oxford, 2019) and (with Gayathri Prabhu)Shadow Craft: Visual Aesthetics of Black and White Hindi Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2020). He also writes widely in the media on matters of education and culture. 

Manipal Academy of Higher Education

What are your roles and responsibilities to the institute and the students? 

“We focus intensively on the personal and intellectual growth of students” 

The chief responsibility I feel as Head is to facilitate the growth of students—we seek to do it by intensive one to one mentoring, detailed feedback, strong encouragement of extra-curricular opportunities such as literary journals, film, sport and theatre clubs, etc. The school system has its merits and constraints. Unfortunately, the Boards are too distant from properly evaluating skills and subjects (be it English or History, or Sociology). It is simply not on an international level and prioritizes rote learning instead of the initiative. The responsibility then is to give the optimum opportunity for student-growth. 

How do you strategize about marketing and administration of your school? 

“Our aim is to expand the learning horizons of our students”

Our faculty has extensive and genuine international experience; we all try to lead students into a more expansive world of understanding and service. Thus, we have anticipated many of the bold new National Education Policy's needs, which has asked that students have more flexible course options and multi-disciplinary career paths. We try to communicate to students in our marketing, administration, and outreach to work hard to play the game at this nimble, international level. And what is evaluated is creativity, hard work, and originality, not merely repeating what teachers want in a traditional exam format.  

How does your curriculum ensure the best practice of industry? 

“We prepare students for both industry and society” 

The Humanities is essentially more about styles and methods of thinking, not the mechanical acquisition of facts. We offer unique, multi-disciplinary courses, drawing from the best national and international practice. We see that students avail the best education from relevant courses which helps one prepare for industry and society. We teach the ability to know what questions to ask vis a vis any corporate or social problem, and focus on relevant real-world problems in India and the world. Thus, what is essential in our Humanities program is not your social background—even if you come from a disadvantaged background or a foreign country, a determined work-ethic will give you excellent scores. There are innumerable such examples from our institute. We are a rare institution--though small, we have students from the Bachelor's level to the Doctoral level. They all interact in a friendly and helpful manner, with the seniors often giving apt career or internship advice.

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What do you think should be the institute’s top priority over the next 10 years? 

“We want our best students to pursue high quality degrees”

Over the next decade, we plan to strengthen the pipeline so that our best undergraduate students are encouraged to get a Ph.D. People have begun to realize over the last decade that all Humanities and social science degrees (from BA to Ph.D.) have a great value in a remarkable range of employment opportunities. As India gets increasingly globalized, it is essential to have communication, design, and problem-solving skills. Humanities skills (which are more broad-based) are understood to be less vulnerable to automation and more adaptive to industry and government service shifts. In our institute, students meet many of the top scholars and artists and even have the freedom to partially tailor conferences and seminars to their interests and strengths if they put in the work. Student-led, collaborative initiatives, especially those that speak to social or intellectual issues, are strongly encouraged. 

What do you see as the Manipal Centre for Humanities greatest strengths? 

“Our efforts to align talent to job-profile makes us unique”

Our greatest strength is our effort to match a student’s talent to the kind of research or job-profile that will make the students successful. We do not believe in stuffing the student with information—instead, college is the time to truly discover who you are as a person, citizen, and employee. In India, unfortunately, rigid expectations from well-wishers often don’t allow a student the crucial mental space they need for making the right career choice—this is a challenge we try to address directly.  

Any advice you would like to give to the current youth and the aspiring students?

“Students should make wise and thoughtful career decisions”

I would advise and urge students to be proactive about their interests and make a strong effort to use their college-years to find their skills, limitations, and dreams. Take the time to deeply research colleges and courses you want instead of just going by convention. Unfortunately, India does not have reliable measures of what good colleges are--most media rankings are based on perception. I appreciate sites like collegedunia for their efforts in giving students more information, though much more needs to be done. In media-rankings traditional colleges do well as they have been around for long--many of them are long past their glory days. Aspiring students, or their parents, must do the hard work of actually researching the college they want to study in-as said, look up courses, faculty, extra-curricular. After getting in, of course, one must have fun in college, but there is little to be gained by entirely frittering away the time when teachers are working hard to try and guide you into stable and prosperous career paths.

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How do you tend to establish a healthy relation and environment in your institute?

“We seek to provide a happy learning atmosphere for students to prosper”

As we have had many international students and faculty, one can see that the years of college are universally memorable worldwide, and we try to create by enabling a happy learning atmosphere. We emphasize significantly that alongside job skills, college is a time where students (often away from home for the first time) must learn to treat each other and elders with healthy respect even if there may be some inevitable disagreements. Our classes encourage this atmosphere where students’ voices are encouraged to be heard, and teachers' informed questions are appreciated and applauded.