And so is intellectually honest scholarship and pedagogy.

For me, the best possibilities of academic life are realized in an appreciation of nuance, complexity, subtlety, depth. What has disappointed me most about academia, a disappointment I have written about in my weblogs for three years now, are all the various ways in which a rich appreciation for the messiness and ambiguity of human life get boxed out or bracketed off in scholarly discussions and pedagogical work. If “politicized” courses, and “politicized” scholarship concern me–and they do–it’s largely because they’re part and parcel of the way that the necessary reductions of the unmanageable and incomprehensible variety of human experience turn into instrumental manglings and amputations, into grinding out scholarship and enrollments like sausage in a factory.

This is one graf of very many written by Tim Burke about the recent ACTA report critical of academia in general for its left biases. As one might expect its a complicated and contentious subject that is difficult for an outsider like me to summarize. If you are interested you probably will have to spend the time to read Burke's series of posts and its references to get some understanding.

My take varies with the last item read - first one side seems to have the more persuasive and useful take on the matter, then the other. Sometimes Burke seems to be channeling Bart Simpson - "I didn't do it, nobody saw me, you can't prove a thing" - and sometimes he produces grafs like the one above that speak directly to what I think is the heart of the matter.