The ideal of nonpolitical scholarship is unattainable in practice.

Evidence

Nevertheless the determining impingement on most knowledge produced in the contemporary West (and here I speak mainly about the United States) is that it be nonpolitical, that is, scholarly, academic, impartial, above partisan or small-minded doctrinal belief. One can have no quarrel with such an ambition in theory, perhaps, but in practice the reality is much more problematic. No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of a society. These continue to bear on what he does professionally, even though naturally enough his research and its fruits do attempt to reach a level of relative freedom from the inhibitions and the restrictions of brute, everyday reality. For there is such a thing as knowledge that is less, rather than more, partial than the individual (with his entangling and distracting life circumstances) who produces it. Yet this knowledge is not therefore automatically nonpolitical. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 68

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the key concept that no method detaches the scholar from class, beliefs, social position, or society — the foundation for Said’s claim that all knowledge is political.
• XREF: Connects to Milgrom and sociological accounts of how knowledge production is socially embedded; scaffolds the later Islamophobia readings’ premise that expertise is never neutral.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 68