The reason that so many academics are socialists has nothing to do with their views of, say, capitalism’s injustice to workers in the third world: they have no trouble ignoring far worse outrages, as long as socialist or third-world government perform them, Rather, they hate capitalism since they personally don’t make much money.

There are, mind you, quite a few dedicated humanities professors who are not surprised the study of the humanities isn’t good business, and would agree it probably *shouldn’t* be, either. But such modest, real teachers–who simply care more about the humanities than about making money–are the minority.

The average humanities professor cares little about his chosen field, and still less about truth or the search for it in general. He mostly cares about his own social status as an “intellectual”. (Ever noticed how the good teachers, the ones you remember fondly as passionate about Shakespeare or 18th-century Indian poetry or Hume–or whatever their specialization was– *never* called themselves “intellectuals”, still less “public intellectuals”?)

It eats him up that he lives in such an economic system where his social status, as a “public intellectual”, is less than that of a beginning lawyer. He longs for an economic system where some powerful junta or dictator gives money “to each according to their merit”–since he’s certain he’d then be at the top of the heap, being so full of caring, understanding, openness, multiculturalism, and all the rest of those self-important meritorious attitudes.

In real life, the first thing such a junta does is, usually, to hang all these “public intellectuals” from the lampposts, as a potential revolutionary danger. But these guys know nothing of history.