Occupy Wall Street has thrown off many sparks. A little one landed in academic economics. On November 2, a group of Harvard students walked out on Greg Mankiw’s intro economics course — according to the professor himself “about 5 to 10 percent of the class stood up and quietly left.” Later that day, the Harvard Political Review posted an open letter the dissenters had written to Mankiw:

We are walking out today to join a Boston-wide march protesting the corporatization of higher education as part of the global Occupy movement. Since the biased nature of Economics 10 contributes to and symbolizes the increasing economic inequality in America, we are walking out of your class today both to protest your inadequate discussion of basic economic theory and to lend our support to a movement that is changing American discourse on economic injustice.

The main complaint of the dissenters, expressed in every paragraph, was bias: “There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith’s economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory.”