"A Timid, Careful, Frightened Lot"
Ben Stein has written an excellent explanation of why so many university faculties are dominated by hate-America ultra-leftists.

I start with a scholarly article I read back in 1971 when I was a government lawyer. A psychologist, I do not know who, had studied government lawyers and lawyers in the private sector, as well as businessmen and professors. His findings were fascinating. Generally, and with certain exceptions, the government lawyers were more close to their mothers than the private lawyers, more fearful than the private lawyers, and less inclined to take risks.

This immediately struck me as true. We were a timid, careful, frightened lot. Why else attach ourselves to the big Mama government who would nurture us, pay us a modest wage, and never expect very much from us? Why shelter ourselves with tenure and lifelong employment instead of going out into the big wide world and looking for the bucks? This, in a nutshell, I think, explains a lot about why professors and their students are so militantly left-wing and anti-American. They are sheltering in the academy from the chanciness and difficulty of the big wide world. They fear that world. And so they express their anger at it, the way frightened people often do.

I think it has to do with tipping points and co-optation. At a certain point, when the radicals took over the student bodies and made major inroads into the faculty recruiting process, they took over recruiting committees. They made it clear that only other frightened, angry, Marxist types such as they would be admitted or allowed to teach, and lo and behold, soon the old patriots were marginalized or learned to keep their mouths shut so they would not get mau-maued at faculty meetings.

The big difference between the anti-American, left-wing dominant group at the schools and the old guard at the schools is this: the old guard permitted, even welcomed dissent. The new left (now the old left) simply hates dissent and will not allow it. Thus you get a faculty that Stalin would be proud of, and a student body that follows their lead.

But there's hope.

Out in the wide world, the students often shed the influence of their faculties and go on to become all kinds of things, even Republicans. Especially when students enter the labor force, their lives change remarkably. Once someone has to get up in the morning, clean up, get dressed, spend the day at work, and live off the pittance he makes, the whole world becomes different. You look at loafers and bums totally differently. You look at taxes differently. You look at a country that gives you opportunity differently. In the workplace, a very rapid maturation takes place for most. Back at the university, where professors have tenure and only have to teach a few hours a week, the situation worsens. The faculty becomes like a black hole in space, a death star that gets ever darker and denser. The faculty is a leisure/intellectual class that never has to grow up and can cling to its fear and its childish loathing of the grownups out in the big wide world forever.

Read the whole thing.