The world is being torn apart, and academics are busy studying it! I am unable to recall when and where the above quip was entered into a notebook of mine. Perhaps I chanced upon it on a Twitter handle while ‘doomscrolling’ or maybe took note from graffiti scrawled on some forlorn wall? It is equally most unlikely that the sarcasm is what caught my eye. Much more likely, on the other hand, that I was inspired by the unstated but evident—that academia and activism can be intellectually impoverished when kept apart. Though, for most, the opposite sentiment is what prevails today—that higher education would be better off if it were entirely purged of any sort of active politics, with students kept focused on getting jobs and clearing their educational loans. Such clear reasoning for an apolitical university has, nonetheless, yet to decisively win. More so amongst the young. If anything, political activism has all but exploded and run rampant in recent years within the high walls of many a university. A slew of campaign style movements, for example, have erupted across some of the most conservative and elite campuses in the United States and Europe: notably, the pro-Palestinian encampments against the genocide in Gaza alongside the dogged demand for university administrators to disinvest from Israel, non-violent actions called the ‘extinction rebellion occupations’ aimed at challenging ‘big oil’ or ‘dirty energy’, and the ‘de-commemoration’ agitations which demanded the removal of colonial era monuments and called for the renaming of public spaces which invoked imperial pasts.