Daily Inspiration Quote by Juan Cole

A professor stumping for a party in front of students isn’t just a breach of etiquette in Juan Cole’s framing; it’s a category error. The line draws a hard border between scholarship and advocacy, using the slightly old-fashioned “proper” to signal that the issue isn’t merely personal taste but professional norm. Cole is defending the classroom as a shared civic space where authority is already asymmetrical: the professor grades, sets the canon, controls the microphone. In that setup, partisan promotion stops being “debate” and starts looking like soft coercion, even when the instructor thinks they’re simply being honest.

The phrase “academic scholarship” does a lot of work. It’s not claiming scholars have no politics; it’s insisting that the legitimacy of academic speech comes from methods (evidence, argument, peer accountability) rather than team loyalty. Cole’s subtext is that partisanship is easy, scholarship is hard, and confusing the two cheapens both. He’s also implicitly protecting students: if a classroom becomes a rally, dissent becomes costly, and learning narrows into signaling.

Context matters because this is the kind of boundary-policing that surfaces whenever universities are accused of ideological capture, or when faculty feel pressured to “take a stand” as public intellectuals. Cole’s intent reads less like neutrality theater than an attempt to preserve credibility: the university’s authority survives only if it can plausibly claim to be more than a megaphone for whichever side currently feels morally urgent.