This makes absolute sense in this manner: those who have been behind the mass murder of the past 100 years have been the academics and the intellectuals. Communism, fascism, eugenics, making a thousand flowers bloom, creating an efficient system for genoicide, systematic terror against your own population, attempting to create a new socialist paradise by killing everyone with farm implements, disinformation for the purpose of agitation propoganda... all these ideas and many, many more have had the explicit support from academics and intellectuals. It is not a surprise that a professor, a person who is, by definition, living in a world of ideas and concepts, can come up with the ultimate expression about the way to get to his ideal world population.
Stuck in a classroom, this guy is simply the ur-Nazi or the ur-Communist. Now imagine this same guy as a trusted advisor to a powerful political or an oligarichical clique.