Crispin Sartwell's op-ed "The smog of academic consensus" points out some of the deep problems with academia. First, faculty are overwhelmingly on the left, nearly unanimous in their support of Barack Obama.

Within the academy, conservatives really are an oppressed minority. At the University of Colorado, for instance, one professor found that, of 800 or so on the faculty, only 32 were registered Republicans. This strikes me as somewhat high, so I assume they are primarily in business or phys ed.

And precious few of those 32 would dream of publicly advocating views associated with The Occidental Observer—that whites, like all other ethnic groups, have interests and the right to defend them. It's a lock that the proposed chair in conservative studies at the University of Colorado will be bestowed on a neocon for whom "conservative values" equals open borders and continuation, if not expansion, of the failed interventionist foreign policy of "regime change" in the Middle East.

Sartwell points to a particularly destructive form of groupthink that has seized the minds of university faculty and put them in an intellectual deep freeze:

The fact that everyone agrees and everyone has a doctorate leads to the occasionally explicit idea that all intelligent people think the same thing — that no one could disagree with, say, Obama-ism, without being an idiot. This attitude is continually expressed, for example, in attacks on presidents Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, not for their political positions but for their grades and IQs.

The problem is that maintaining one's reputation as an "intellectual" is the basic stock-in-trade for academics. (For "intellectual" read "devoid of any group interests" — if, and only if, one is white, that is.) To dissent from this consensus is to trade their mortar boards for a dunce caps—the worst possible fate for an academic and the quick route to pariahdom.

And it's not just in the academic world. The mainstream media continually vilifies white people who advocate defending their people and culture as intellectual cretins. A classic example that probably went a long way toward creating this stereotype was the TV show All in the Family from the 1970s, produced by Norman Lear who has a strong ethnic identity of his own in addition to being a liberal activist.

All in the Family repeatedly brought out that the main character, Archie Bunker, was uneducated and none too smart—constantly mispronouncing even ordinary words and lacking a basic understanding of geography or history—Lincoln signed the Declaration of Independence, Denmark is the capital of Colorado, and Florida is on the West coast. But this TV show still shapes current attitudes about people who have a problem with massive non-white immigration and multiculturalism.

As Sartwell notes, academic brainlock groupthink can be linked to the atmosphere in graduate school:

[The herd-like mentality of professors is] the predictable result of the fact that a professor has been educated, often for a decade or more, by the very institutions that harbor this unanimity. Every new generation of professors has been steeped in an atmosphere in which the authorities all agree and in which they associate agreement with intelligence — and with degrees, jobs, tenure and so on. If you've been taught that conservatives are evil idiots, then conservatism itself justifies a decision not to hire or tenure one. Every new leftist minted by graduate programs is an act of self-praise, a confirmation of the intelligence of the professors.

New Ph.D.'s are often in awe of the professors they worked with as graduate students and strive to emulate them, even down to personal mannerisms. Quite a bit of this is pure self-interest: For most academics, upward mobility in their professional societies requires maintaining their ties with their mentors from graduate school. Their mentors write letters of recommendation at each stage in the promotion cycle, and they serve on the editorial boards of important journals — something to think about when submitting an article for publication. To publicly dissent from the political culture of the university is to cut oneself off from all that is important in life.

Finally, Jewish identity and interests must be considered because of the prominent status of Jewish intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences. As Kevin MacDonald pointed out in Chapter 1 of The Culture of Critique:

Once Jews ... attained intellectual predominance, it is not surprising that gentiles would be attracted to Jewish intellectuals as members of a socially dominant and prestigious group and as dispensers of valued resources. Such a perspective fits well with an evolutionary perspective on group dynamics: Gentiles negotiating the intellectual status hierarchy would be attracted to the characteristics of the most dominant members of the hierarchy, especially if they viewed the hierarchy as permeable. Writer William Barrett, a gentile editor of Partisan Review, describes his “awe and admiration” of the New York Intellectuals ... early in his career. “They were beings invested in my eyes with a strange and mysterious glamour” .... Partisan Review was a flagship journal of this very influential intellectual movement and had a decisive influence on success or failure in the literary world. Leslie Fiedler … [noted] that “the writer drawn to New York from the provinces feels . . . the Rube, attempts to conform; and the almost parody of Jewishness achieved by the gentile writer in New York is a strange and crucial testimony of our time.”

So the impressionable graduate student goes off to the big university and emerges a Ph.D., brain not merely washed, but dry cleaned and pressed, confident that his leftist leanings are a sign of high intelligence and moral rectitude, not to mention the ticket to social acceptance and professional success. He thereby assumes a parody of Jewishness. (Perhaps "Judeomimicry" or even "Judeo-identity" would be better words.)

The only price is that he must turn a blind eye to how the ethnic identities of several generations of Jewish professors at elite universities have transformed the culture of the university in ways that serve Jewish interests, not the interests of his own people (unless, of course, he be Black or a member of any of the many other ethnic groups with their own fiefdoms at the university). But at least he is confident that he will not be looked down on by his intellectual superiors.

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