On the Desire for Politics in the Classroom

Many students, including me, desire to put the classroom in the service of politics. I mean that many of us think that, with the forces of thought, knowledge-production, and scholarship on our side, we can enact political change and transformation. And while it is true that we can, it might be worth pausing over this desire to ask the question: Should “the life of the mind,” to borrow Hannah Arendt’s formulation, be employed to enact social change, issue public policy and modify our ethos toward