Daily Inspiration Quote by Juan Cole

There is a quiet provocation in Juan Cole's "really unfortunate": it sounds mild, almost managerial, yet it smuggles in an indictment of how power now treats expertise. Cole isn't pleading for professors to get a seat at the table for ego's sake; he's mourning a system that increasingly prefers certainty theater over disciplined uncertainty. Academics, at their best, are trained to say "it depends" and to show their work. In a media-politics ecosystem built for hot takes, that reflex reads like weakness, even obstruction.

The intent is reformist, but the subtext is adversarial. "Sidelined" frames exclusion as structural, not accidental: decisions are being made in rooms and on panels where incentives reward speed, loyalty, and message discipline. Policy debates become performances of resolve, with evidence invited only if it can be summarized into a talking point. Cole, a public-facing scholar known for translating complex Middle East history for general audiences, is also defending a particular kind of civic labor: slow knowledge, contextual knowledge, knowledge that complicates the story politicians want to tell.

Context matters: post-9/11 foreign policy, the Iraq war, and the subsequent distrust of "experts" created a feedback loop where academic credibility is alternately weaponized and dismissed. The line is less nostalgia for an ivory-tower golden age than a warning about what fills the vacuum when scholars are pushed out: consultants selling access, pundits selling coherence, and ideologues selling moral clarity. The tragedy, for Cole, isn't that academics lose influence. It's that policy loses memory.