Full disclosure: I am a politically active faculty in the classroom

My socialist, ultra-left, and left-leaning union-card-carrying faculty colleagues who get pissed off at me because I refuse to goose step with them, typically have political statements, cartoons, and news clips on their office doors and walls.  They walk and talk with their political affiliations and views on their metaphorical shirt sleeves and, from what I understand, often express them in their classes too.

My office door has nothing, except for an airline sticker to wake me up for food!

The walls in my office are bare, but for an "upside down" map of the world that I had bought when traveling in New Zealand.

To the casual visitor or student, it might seem as if I am uninterested in politics.  Students could even conclude from what they see that I am an immigrant who cares not about the American political scene, and am perhaps even ignorant of it.

To me, it is all simple: it is my responsibility to provide students with an intellectual and physical space that says nothing about my political preferences.  Even if they try to second guess my views on a political issue, well, I want students to wonder if they are even close to being correct.

Of course, reading my blog, which apparently some students occasionally do, one might draw a clearer picture of my political interests and opinions.

I don't take my own opinions to the classroom, and remind students to never worry about tailoring their responses to fit whatever they think is the correct political response that will get them the best grade from me.

Yet, despite all these, I know I am being ultra-activist in any of the classes I teach.

Because, I continuously prod them to think.

I tell them, over and over, that I want them to be curious and to have an inquiring mind.  That is one of the most subversive political activity ever, as Azar Nafisi has noted:

SOME ASSUME that the only way academics can engage the politics of the day is by coming out of their ivory tower and protesting in front of the White House. But in conveying knowledge, the academy has a far more important and subversive way of dealing with political issues. Knowledge provides us with a way to perceive the world. Imaginative  knowledge provides us with a way to see ourselves in the world, to relate to the world, and thereby, to act in the world. The way we perceive ourselves is reflected in the way we interact, the way we take our positions, and the way we interpret politics.
Curiosity, the desire to know what one does not know, is essential to genuine knowledge. Especially in terms of literature, it is a sensual longing to know through experiencing others—not only the others in the world, but also the others within oneself. That is why, in almost every talk I give, I repeat what Vladimir Nabokov used to tell his students: curiosity is insubordination in its purest form. If we manage to teach our students to be curious—not to take up our political positions, but just to be curious—we will have managed to do a great deal.

I am not sure though whether students really understand it when I tell them that the only thing I want from them is to come to class with a curious mind.  I worry that most have been conditioned to behave otherwise in most of their classes.  Unfortunate!