When I was a college student and in my early twenties I was aware that my opinions on political stuff changed a lot. So I didn't worry about politics much, I had an opinion about right and wrong but didn't take it seriously. That is apolitical.
Saying that something is apolitical is like saying someone is speaking with "unaccented English". By definition, you can't say anything in any language without an accent, it's just that some accents, by virtue of being default, get promoted to the status of "unaccented".
If you strip it of context then sure. Grad students working on pl research are largely funded by the government, often by the military. They work in a subfield that has low adoption among undergrads, especially undergrads from schools other than top ranked schools. The work seeks to solve a specific set of problems in cs and software engineering, which may or may not be the most impactful problems out there. We also see vast differences in formal methods between US and European institutions both in coursework and in research.
To be apolitical is to make the tacit political statement, "Things are okay enough for me to not care." It's very difficult to be truly apolitical in a nation where a birthright to political interest in whatever you deem fit has been vested in you since... well, birth. Assuming you're American.
> To be apolitical is to make the tacit political statement, "Things are okay enough for me to not care."
But the point is, they don't care. Which makes this position apolitical, an absence of political opinion. The fact that they aren't spurred into political actions due to personal suffering does not mean that there's no such thing as being apolitical.
In this case, yeah, it does. To not care either way is to be okay with ceding your right to care to others. Which is... a choice. An opinion on the worthiness or usefulness of having that choice. The only way to be apolitical is to never have had a choice... And since duress makes having a true stance impossible, there's no way to be apolitical.
Being apolitical just means that instead of trying to change society you make the best out of it. Of course it makes more sense for privileged people to be apolitical, but plenty of people without privilege are apolitical as well.
Examples of apolitical people who doesn't fit your description: Illegal immigrants who try to keep theirs heads down and just work, women who adopt a conservative role instead of fighting it, slaves who picked cotton instead of making a fuzz, Gays who pretended to be straight and even married etc.
If you think a bit, being political is almost always more work than not being political. So it is mostly very privileged people who engage in it. The rest are just trying to get by, they don't have the time or energy to spare being political.
None of these are examples of "apolitical" stances. They are people on the margins who are not able to vocalize what they feel to be in their best interests, either way. To hold an apolitical stance under duress is not really to hold an apolitical stance.
