The issue is not simply, as is often claimed by conservatives, that the vast majority of American academics are ideologically liberal. Though true, that is not perhaps the salient socio-intellectual element in their makeup. Rather, it is that most professors, and certainly those in the humanities and social sciences, have adopted an oppositional stance to society and power their entire lives, one that becomes engrained and unreflective over time. Their embrace of the political over the intellectual is what Julien Benda decried in the early 20th century as the “treason of the clerks.” It is part of the assumed ethos of being a professor, the belief that one is sacrificing one’s self-interest for the larger community or the dispassionate search for knowledge. This also helps make many professors feel martyrs to the cause of social justice, equality, world peace, and the like. As Jacques Barzun wrote in 1959: “The beleaguered intellectual — it is a badge and a position in life.”

In reality, though, what it often means is that America’s universities and colleges are filled with adults who themselves have not moved much beyond their own student days, either emotionally or intellectually. They also are as a group very risk averse; after all, the crown of academic achievement is tenure, where lifetime employment insulated from the regular job market is assured.

Most professors have thus spent their entire lives in the collegiate community, going directly or almost directly from undergraduate to graduate to teaching. Most have never held any real responsibility, certainly any accountability, and even when they have had such positions (dean, etc.), the system has largely insulated them from any real exercise of or need to respond to power. It is, in many ways, a comfortable way to spend one’s life, where class time and office hours circumscribe the boundaries of one’s responsibilities, along with the ever-present need to write books and articles, grade papers, and advise students.