Emancitopia

 

It is hard to write about the person you lost. A teacher you loved from the heart but now is just a memory. Asad awakens my inner teacher and inner guru. So, I ask myself: isn’t he still in me, alive? This question momentarily eases the pain of his loss and grief and invites me to write.

First Encounters: Skepticism Meets Something Real

I met him in January 2023, uncertain whether I even wanted to keep the course. I came from a rigorously empirical background—international relations, political economy, Canadian politics. When I enrolled in Democratic Administration, I expected to learn about Canadian or American institutions of democracy. I was shocked by the syllabus. None of the readings matched my expectations, and worse, it all looked theoretical. Had I accidentally signed up for Political Theory?

Who was Asad Haider? The previous semester, I had registered for another of his courses but dropped it without attending a single class. The syllabus had seemed impossibly long, the readings impossibly dense—classical Marxist texts, one from Mao. I wondered: who teaches this material? Is he just another Marxist who has lost touch with reality?

The first session of Democratic Administration changed everything.

He looked intelligent, compassionate, sane, humble, grounded. He began by defending his unconventional syllabus. What caught my attention was his insistence that thinking and action are not separate—that a theoretical course on democratic administration is not divorced from the realities of democracy.

What struck me most about Asad was his refusal to simplify. In a world where professors often reduce complex ideas to digestible bullet points, he insisted that we sit with discomfort. He believed the struggle to understand was itself transformative—that wrestling with a text was not separate from wrestling with the world.

This is telling when you read Undergraduate students’ comments about him online: he never gave them slides summarizing the readings, never simplified texts for them, and asked them to take their own notes. This approach feels distant from the institution where I now teach and study. Undergraduate students expect professors to solve problems for them and to provide simplified materials. Most professors are happy to oblige. Nobody wants to sit with the unsettling feeling that academic life does not necessarily have all the answers—and that answers do not necessarily come from the professor. Asad grasped something essential: the teacher does not possess the answer but knows he is no better than his students.

The Unconventional Syllabus

Looking back, I understand why his syllabi seemed so strange at first. Asad was not interested in teaching us what to think about democracy. He was interested in teaching us how to think—carefully, historically, with attention to contradiction and complexity.

His reading lists were deliberately heterogeneous, almost impossibly so. The syllabus for Democratic Administration read like a battlefield of ideas spanning the entire twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson appeared alongside Friedrich Engels and Nietzsche in the opening week. Lenin’s State and Revolution was followed by Max Weber’s vocation lectures. Hans Kelsen’s defence of parliamentary democracy led to Carl Schmitt’s devastating critique. Gramsci and Foucault shared space with Althusser and Machiavelli. Fidel Castro and Amilcar Cabral appeared alongside Mao Zedong. The course concluded with W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Alain Badiou on Saint Paul.

Consider those juxtapositions. Wilson, the architect of liberal internationalism, read against Engels on the state and revolution. Lenin theorizing the smashing of the state apparatus, followed by Weber on the ethics of political vocation. Schmitt—the Nazi jurist who saw parliamentary democracy as a corpse kept alive by artificial means—assigned alongside Georges Bataille on the psychological structure of fascism and Leo Strauss on German nihilism. And at the end: justice, approached through the radical traditions of Black American struggle and Badiou’s reading of Paul’s universalism.

This was not eclecticism for its own sake. It was intellectual honesty carried to its logical conclusion. Asad refused the comfortable illusion that we can understand democracy by reading only its defenders, or that we can defeat dangerous ideas by ignoring them. He believed that honest inquiry requires confronting what is uncomfortable, what we might prefer to look away from.

His syllabus note on “Protocols of Reading and Discussion” captured this perfectly:

We will be reading difficult, controversial, and provocative texts… You must also be prepared to discuss the readings, without dismissing them or leaping to judgment based on opinion. Criticizing texts for not taking another position, not addressing some other topic, or not being written in a different style, does not constitute critique, which, rather than being a practice of fault-finding, assesses the validity and limits of a given discourse on its own terms.

This was the method: immanent critique rather than fault-finding. Understand a thinker’s premises and aims before judging them. Read Schmitt as Schmitt intended to be read. Read Lenin as Lenin intended to be read. Only then can you assess whether they succeed or fail on their own terms—and only then can you grasp why these ideas gripped millions of people and shaped the catastrophic history of the last century.

By placing oppositional thinkers in conversation, by guiding us to read across ideological lines, he taught us something crucial: ideas do not exist in isolation. They respond to each other, critique each other, sometimes steal from each other. The liberal tradition looks different after reading its Marxist critics. The Marxist tradition looks different when you have read its fascist perversions. Wilson’s idealism looks different after Lenin’s critique of imperialism. Kelsen’s defence of parliamentarism looks different after Schmitt’s attack.

The readings that seemed “old-fashioned” to my empiricist eyes were actually invitations to think beyond the narrow present, to recognize that our current political vocabulary is not the only one available, that human beings have imagined and struggled for radically different ways of organizing collective life—some emancipatory, some catastrophic, some unsettlingly ambiguous. some unsettlingly ambiguous.

The Radical Act of Withholding Judgement

Here is something that might seem counterintuitive: Asad never shared his political opinions in class.

For a man who assigned Mao and Marx, Lenin and Weber, who taught democratic theory with obvious passion, who clearly cared deeply about politics—this restraint was remarkable. And it was deliberate.

What Asad practiced was a kind of pedagogical epoché—a methodological suspension of his own position that created conditions for genuine inquiry. Just as the phenomenological epoché brackets our everyday assumptions to let phenomena appear as themselves, Asad bracketed his authority to let ideas appear on their own terms. Students encountered Schmitt as Schmitt, Lenin as Lenin—not as positions already filtered through professorial judgment.

By withholding his own position, Asad created something rare in contemporary academia: a truly open podium. In his seminars, different ideas could be shared and criticized equally, without one perspective dominating simply because it carried the weight of professorial authority. Students with conservative views could speak as freely as those with radical ones. No one had to guess what the professor wanted to hear.

This restraint was not born of indifference but of principle—and, I now recognize, of hope. Asad’s silence was utopian in Ernst Bloch’s precise sense: not wishful thinking, but anticipatory consciousness that keeps the future open. By refusing to tell us what to think, he refused to foreclose what we might become. His classroom was a space of the Not-Yet, where our thinking remained incomplete, still developing, not yet determined by any authority.

Asad recognized that the moment a teacher declares their position, the classroom subtly reorganizes itself around that declaration. Students begin positioning themselves in relation to the professor’s views. The seminar becomes a stage for pleasing or resisting authority rather than a space for authentic inquiry. The future of thought closes down.

By refusing this dynamic, Asad enacted the democratic principles he taught. He did not just lecture about equal participation and open debate—he created the conditions for them. His silence about his own politics was, paradoxically, one of the most political aspects of his teaching. It was what Miguel Abensour might call “savage democracy” in miniature: a space that protected the irreducible unpredictability of human thought, the capacity for transformation that no authority can predetermine.

I think he trusted that if ideas were examined with precision and honesty, students would find their own way to positions worth holding. He did not need to tell us what to think. He needed to teach us how to think—and then, with the discipline of educated hope, get out of the way.

A Teacher Who Built Friendships

Asad was one of the few remaining people in academia who cared about building genuine friendships with students. In an age when professors retreat behind office hours and email auto-replies, when the student-teacher relationship has become increasingly transactional, Asad moved in the opposite direction. He understood that an intellectual community requires something more than scheduled appointments.

Before and after class, he was always surrounded by students. He didn’t rush off to his next obligation. He stayed. He talked. He listened. He remained open and responsive in a way that felt almost countercultural—a quiet rebellion against the bureaucratization of university life.

On the last day of class, he invited us to the campus bar. We talked for two, maybe three hours. Not about grades or assignments or academic careers, but about ideas, about life, about the things that actually matter. It was the gathering that universities are supposed to foster but so rarely do—a space where the boundaries between teacher and student softened without disappearing, where intellectual exchange became indistinguishable from friendship.

This wasn’t incidental to his teaching. It was essential to it. Asad understood that ideas don’t flourish in isolation. They need conversation, community, the friction of different minds meeting over drinks or coffee. He created those spaces deliberately, generously, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

What Remains

It is a strange thing to lose a teacher. Unlike losing a family member or close friend, the loss is mediated by the formality of the student-teacher relationship and institutional setting. And yet the grief is real, perhaps because a good teacher touches something essential in us—our capacity for growth, our sense of possibility, our belief that we might become more than we currently are.

Asad showed me that ideas matter, that careful thinking is a form of care for the self and the world, that intellectual work and political commitment are not opposites but partners. He demonstrated that it is possible to be both rigorous and humane, both demanding and generous, both deeply political and genuinely open.

Asad had a lasting mark on me. When I teach—whether formally in a classroom or informally in conversation—I can see his impact: the patience, the insistence on complexity, the faith in human intelligence, the refusal to separate thought from action, the discipline of withholding easy answers so that others might find their own and being the compassionate lisener.

In this sense, he is not entirely gone. The teachers who shape us do not disappear when they die. They live on in how we think, how we question, how we refuse easy answers. Every time I pause before responding to a question, every time I resist the urge to simplify, every time I trust that a student can handle difficulty, every time I hold back my own opinion to let others find their way—that is Asad, still teaching.

If you were also touched by Asad’s teaching, I invite you to remember not just what he taught but how he taught. Remember the way he listened. Remember his pauses. Remember how he made difficult ideas feel urgent and alive. Remember how he made us feel capable of serious thought and feeling heard and validated. Remember those conversations that spilled out of the classroom and into the bar, into the hallways, into our lives. Remember the open podium he created by his generous silence.

And if you never had the chance to know him, perhaps these words can offer a glimpse of what was lost—and what, in some form, persists. The best teachers leave traces that outlast their physical presence. They change how we see, and those changes propagate outward, touching lives they will never know.

Asad changed how I see. This writing is one small attempt to pass that gift along.