[Dumb_Ox]

I think there are old Boston Brahmin forces at work in academia. Anti-communism is so working class. To them, racism is a pathology of blue-collar whites and the Johnny Rebs. Minorities are so novel in their social circles that they provide useful teaching aids for themselves and children of privilege. Harvard's so loaded with old money, guilt about unearned privilege is easily tweaked.

Since Harvard and the other Ivies are feeder schools for the nation's professoriate, these peculiar prejudices find their way throughout the system. I suspect if state universities could require a significant portion of their faculty to be native residents of their states this would be less of a problem.

[x]

Anti-communism is so working class.

That's more or less it. It's not ideology so much as snobbery and tribalism.

A century ago those "Boston Brahmins" could be very conflicted about politics, though. For today's academics, anxiety about the left doesn't exist, because for all practical purposes, they are it. Things looked different when there was fear of a real working class socialist movement.