In its action in “parting ways” with – for those of us who didn’t have the honour of studying at Unacademy, in plain English this means sacking – educator Karan Sangwan for the action of telling his students to vote for educated leaders and its subsequent explanation as to why it did so, Unacademy, an education platform, is both right and wrong. But, from purely a commercial perspective, the company has possibly scored a huge self-goal – one that could cost it future enrolments as well as funding.
Right, because trying to “wrongly influence” students by urging them to use the power of vote effectively by voting for the best candidate – read literate – in an election is not the job of a teacher. Unacademy can always buttress its assertion by pointing out that even our Constitution drafters didn’t make it mandatory for a candidate to hold a college of university degree in order to contest an election.
Studies have shown that educated leaders are not always better. Look around you these days and you will also realise that being educated doesn’t necessarily make one wiser or smarter. Most of us, especially our friends and family members, are getting re-educated by the world’s biggest universities – WhatsApp and other social media. But being educated also gives us an ability to find answers to several of society’s problems. That, possibly, was what Sangwan was thinking when he suggested that his students elect educated candidates.
While speaking on the issue of making it mandatory for candidates for MP and MLA elections to possess some basic minimum education, Dr B.R. Ambedkar said, “I think that it is a matter which might be left to the legislatures. If the legislature at the time of the prescribing qualification feels that literacy qualification is a necessary one, I no doubt think that they will do it.”
Incidentally, while Ambedkar took a nuanced view, something that the members of the Constituent Assembly also agreed with, the nation’s first President Dr Rajendra Prasad, who had earlier served as president of the Constituent Assembly, was among those who had hoped that education would be a key criteria for future lawmakers.
“There are only two regrets which I must share with the honourable members. I would have liked to have some qualifications laid down for members of the legislatures. It is anomalous that we should insist upon high qualifications for those who administer or help in administering the law but none for those who make it except that they are elected. A law giver requires intellectual equipment but even more than that capacity to take a balanced view of things, to act independently and above all to be true to those fundamental things of life – in one word – to have character,” he said.
As for Unacademy, once it is done with parting ways with all educated, opinionated educators on its payroll, the company can do all of us a favour by making public its “Code of Conduct” on what its staff can tell or teach the students and what not. That will also further help the unicorn which is reeling under losses – in fiscal 2021-22, despite higher revenues, its losses went up to Rs 2,848 crore and the company has seen some of the highest layoffs in the sector – rein in its balance-sheet.
Having said that, one must say that Unacademy couldn’t have been more wrong. Because the Supreme Court did note – that too in a case dealing with mandatory educational qualifications, among other criteria, for panchayati raj representatives in Haryana: “It is only education which gives a human being the power to discriminate between right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore, prescription of an educational qualification is not irrelevant for better administration of the panchayats.”
Instead of trying to be on the safe side of those who used social media to attack it after Sangwan’s video, Unacademy’s focus should be to shore up its flailing balance sheet and attract more talented educators and students.
Also, instead of firing people like Sangwan, it must try and attract more talent.
Else, the question on everybody’s mind, especially its prospective hires, would be: What will the company do if there’s social media backlash against something that it or one of its employees does in the future? How many Sangwans will it fire to appease the trolls?
The real purpose of education, it must realise, is to be enlightened, alive to what is going on around us and, therefore, be able to take a morally correct stand. Unacademy is a business and while in India you need to be on the right side of the government to be able to do even your lawful business, there must have been a better way to sidestep the mudslinging that followed Sangwan’s video without knowingly stepping into the mud.
What, however, has happened is that the amount of backlash that has come Unacademy’s way after it announced it had parted ways with Sangwan has turned the entire incident into a massive negative PR exercise for the struggling company.
The scale of the negative PR is such that no amount of sponsorship of cricket tournaments or series will earn it brownie points or erase the last few days from public memory.
Six months from now, unless it manages to do something positive on a very large scale, the first things that will hit our Google feed when you type Unacademy could possibly be news stories – most of them negative – about its recent travails.
And, in this case, the only people to blame are the top executives of the unicorn.
Incidentally, Unacademy isn’t alone in staring at this self-made PR disaster. Recently, Ashoka University, another educational institute – this one running out of a brick and mortar structure in Sonepat in Haryana, which aims to be the citadel of liberal arts and social sciences education in India – too inflicted upon itself an agonising self-goal.
By possibly facilitating the sudden resignation of Sabyasachi Das, an assistant professor, following a controversy over his research paper that suggested that the BJP won a disproportionate share of closely contested parliamentary seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, especially in states where it was the ruling party at the time, Ashoka poked another hole into its position as a fledgling centre of excellence for liberal arts.
In the short time that it has been functioning, Ashoka University has seen several high-profile and controversial exits that could reduce the aura that attracts students to its campus.
Like Unacademy, Ashoka’s founders too need to calculate the high cost of bad PR and do some urgent damage control.
Maneesh Chhibber is a senior journalist.
