Critical Mass, a blog devoted to what’s wrong with American academe, has weighed in on the emerging scandal we here at Big Journalism are calling “Academia-Gate” — the “Cry Wolf” request for proposals devoted to pre-empting and discrediting conservative political positions in the sheep’s clothing of disinterested academic “scholarship,” spearheaded by leftist professor Peter Dreier at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

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It’s not a pretty sight:

On the one hand, there are no surprises–there has been a decades-long academic tradition, at this point, of discounting the notion that disinterested research is even possible, and of selling the idea that the proper response to this is to shape one’s scholarship self-consciously, as a means of ensuring that it assists and justifies the kinds of social justice one would like to see in the world. On the other hand, this activist line of thought has historically had only one line of defense–and that is that it is conducted with impeccable scholarly integrity, is entirely above-board vis a vis research ethics, and is unimpeachable from within the standards of professional conduct. In other words, the ethical standards that accompany interested scholarship are, in theory, terrifically strict. That’s how such scholarship can continue to call itself scholarship, and escape being dismissed as propaganda. It’s a shaky edifice, but it’s an edifice all the same, and it has succeeded. Arguably, though, the Cry Wolf project undermines that entire edifice, as it explicitly supports the arguments of those who would say that large swathes of academia are little more than publicly funded mechanisms for disseminating and producing an ideologically-driven world view.

Ya think?

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Isn’t it long since past time for the “shaky edifice” to come down? Isn’t it time that the fig leaf of “terrifically strict” ethics be snatched away so that we can all get a good long look at what lies beneath? It’s one thing for liberals to patronize the Brookings Institution and conservatives to head over to the American Enterprise Institute to find policy papers that support their political beliefs, but higher education was supposed to be neutral.

… little more than publicly funded mechanisms for disseminating and producing an ideologically-driven world view.

Critical Mass’s Erin O’Connor concludes with a series of questions:

So where are we here? Is this academic freedom blooming forth in its bountiful variety? Or is it a serious, even actionable violation of academic ethics, not to mention abuse of grad students, exploitation of institutional reputation, and wrongful use of taxpayer dollars? Or is it somewhere in the middle?

That’s what we’re here to find out.

Stay tuned.