2757 Why do we tolerate leftist academics?

If we believe in the market, and they are tolerated by the people paying their salaries, what's so bad? Jane Galt answers:

"Firstly, academics are broadly ignored (ask any academic) so it does not matter what they say at all. Occasionally the marginal idea escapes the academy and has an impact, but by and large students just want to graduate, academics just want to be insulated from the real world, and the real world wants to be isolated from loonies who go on about how great Che Guevara was. In this light, the Academy is a very efficient mechanism, creating surplus for all.

Secondly, I don't know why people like to ascribe the ills of the world to left-wing ideology, right-wing ideology, or any kind of ideology at all. It's not like humans weren't making dumb and violent decisions long before "ideology" was invented, or that humans will not make dumb and violent decisions if ideology was magically erased. The issue here is that humans intrinsically do dumb and violent things, and the notion that this is somehow driven by ideas cooked up by some guys sitting in an Ivory Tower, writing papers that no one else reads, is bogus. Primitive tribes in the Amazon regularly slaughtered significant %s of neighboring tribes, and they didn't even have paper."

Read the whole article here.

I have withdrawn thousands of volumes from library shelves in a university over the years which have gone into dumpsters. I always looked at the check-out record. Many had never circulated. Blogs are read more often than some academics' books and articles.