Dean’s Message

Welcome to the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Business Studies.

Every student who leaves this Faculty should carry two fluencies: authority in a chosen discipline, and command of the computational tools that discipline now runs on. Not one subject with a trace of the other attached — both, taught deliberately and assessed as one. Artificial intelligence makes the question urgent: what must a graduate be able to do when computation is assumed?

Few faculties are better placed to answer it. A faculty of liberal arts and business studies inside a university founded on science and technology is a rare construction in India — and this one operates at a scale larger than many universities: some 8,300 students across five constituent schools — Computing, Commerce and Finance, Applied Sciences, Digital Media, and Fashion Design — spanning eighteen departments. Three languages run through them all: computation, commerce and culture — and this Faculty is built to teach them together.

Concretely, that means fashion joined to computational design — a graduate who understands materials and can also read the supply-chain and consumption data on which the industry now decides. Media shaped by algorithms — a graduate fluent in the generative tools remaking that industry, and able to judge what they produce. And the traffic runs both ways: psychology should travel into business studies, visual communication, even computer science — and a commerce graduate should interrogate the model behind a forecast, not merely read its output. The tools serve the discipline, and the discipline keeps sovereignty over its questions. Nothing here reduces a subject to its computable parts.

In a faculty of this size, distinction is designed rather than inherited — through what is taught, how it is assessed, and what happens to a student who arrives underprepared.

Research is treated the same way: with one hundred and sixty-six doctoral scholars already working across its departments, this Faculty’s capacity is greater than its published record suggests — and it grows through mentoring, collaboration and honest peer reading rather than through targets alone. Building that culture is the Dean’s work, and it begins from inside. I still teach — senior civil servants of the Government of India among my students — and I still write: current work runs from indexed journal research to a sole-authored chapter in a forthcoming Edward Elgar research handbook and a monograph in progress with a Justice of the Supreme Court of Poland. I would not ask a colleague to meet a standard I was not still meeting myself — in the classroom or in print.

Employability begins with the first job, and we take that seriously. But careers turn — and by the fourth job a graduate is running on what a broad education gave them, not on what a syllabus did. That is the horizon we teach for. Relationships with industry and government matter to a student only when they produce live projects, internships and placements. That is the test I apply to them.

I have spent a working life in each of this Faculty’s three languages — computation in submarines and systems, commerce in boardrooms and ministries, culture in the institutions that form people. From the National Defence Academy I went into the Executive Branch of the Indian Navy, serving in ships and submarines with the frontier technology of the day — integrated weapon systems, satellite navigation in its first generation. A submarine is an unforgiving teacher of systems thinking: everything is connected, and every decision has consequences you live inside. My first teaching was in naval training establishments and in command of NCC formations across Tamil Nadu; universities followed, and years in consulting — latterly as Maritime Practice Leader at PwC India, advising boards, ministries and multilateral institutions across five countries.

This is a place for students who want to be judged by what they can actually do, and for colleagues who want to build that. I intend to see it built properly.

A mariner learns early that a position is only useful once you know where you intend to be. This Faculty knows its position, and the University has set the destination. My work is to chart the course between the two — and to see that a degree from this Faculty becomes a distinction its graduates carry for life.

Ganesh V Radhakrishnan

PhD, IIM Ahmedabad · MBA, IIM Kozhikode · Postdoctoral Fellow, Singapore Institute of Technology · B.Sc., National Defence Academy / Jawaharlal Nehru University · formerly Maritime Practice Leader, PwC India