Education should not be rote learning. It should enable new ideas, new innovations. The mind should be allowed to constantly think beyond the written words. Research makes a person think analytically. Or at times, it enables creative thinking – thinking completely out of the box. The former leads to policy analysis, the latter to new inventions. Civilizations cannot progress without such work.
The school gives you the basic knowledge of different subjects. In college, you specialize in a specific group of subjects, like mathematics or economics or architecture. The professor who has done active research will be able to expose the students to far wider frontiers of knowledge and develop their analytical skills. Instead of just mugging up the textbooks, the students would engage in ideation, analysis and reporting the results. It would be a far more enriching process of teaching-learning.
Amity University Mumbai does not restrict their faculty members in doing a set research that would result in conventional research output. Instead, Amity faculty members indulge into a vast range of research methods: laboratory experiments, human experiments (for example, what makes the student pick up a new language faster), animation design and production of games, social interventions through social work, participating in fashion shows, conducting in-depth surveys at community level, partnerships with industries for developing implementable solutions to specific factory level problems, etc. With such freedom to choose their research paths, faculty members encourage students also to explore what they are interested in – it can be ranging from studying plays by Chekov to looking at cinema and politics or serving cancer patients and reporting the results.
This gives a lot of freedom to the students and faculty community to pursue whatever interests them the most – without anyjudgment. As the case of Galileo shows, being judgmental has only made societies lose. Amity University Mumbai believes that it is the unrestricted mind that comes out with the best solutions.