It's not the masses you need to be worried about, hiou. It wasn't the masses gassing people by the millions... it was the elites, who got a few people to go along with them. "The masses" organize poorly... it's the people who are smart enough to successfully do something with their bad idea, but not smart enough to see through the bad idea, that must be feared.
The deep-rooted fear of academia isn't that the masses may do something stupid with the idea of gender differences... it's the fear that they, the academics, will do something stupid. (Again. Although, not the same literal people, of course.)
It's not just "academics". It's anyone who can take an idea and successfully run with it, without stopping to notice all the signs that are yelling at them "Stop! This isn't working as you expected!" Academia merely happens to have a large concentration of such people, for structural reasons. (The "ivory tower" is a real effect, and it is both a good thing because it permits concentration and focus, and a bad thing, because it begets people too stuck in their theories and smart enough to "explain away" anything, until it is much too late.)
This is not something "the masses" do, because "the masses" do not have the ability to successfully run with an idea and gather enough power to impose it.
It's not just the holocaust, either. There's a huge history of 20th-century "social engineering" that rather a lot of people would rather forget, because it pretty uniformly went badly. See also "eugenics" for another reason that academics are afraid to think too hard about how people may be different or how genes may determine things about people... and not entirely without reason. "The masses" did not impose eugenics. In fact a lot of eugenics had to be hidden from the masses.
With power comes the power to screw up. Academics have a lot of power. It would be strange if they'd never screwed up.
Academics have approximately zero power. This is the craziest conspiracy theory I've seen in a while, because it's just so obviously wrong. Oh yes, college professors need to be kept in check because otherwise they'll go out and kill all the Jews. WTF?
Go research where Lenin came from. Go research who did eugenics, and where they got their ideas from. Go research the origin of a lot of the Nazi figures and where their ideas came from. (Not just Hitler.)
Express all the humorous strawmen you like. How do you think these things happen? In the 20th century, the only bad social engineering event I can think of that could even remotely be considered the outgrowth of a broad movement of the masses is sort of Nazi-ism. Everything else was led by somebody with an idea from academia. "The masses" don't originate many ideas, and in the era of the all-powerful State (which the 20th century is firmly in), "the masses" don't run around committing genocide, or doing any of the things they may have done in previous social systems, because all that power is now reserved to the State.
And the State and academia have always been attached at the hip, as they are today. How else would it be? Do you think it's some sort of bizarre coincidence that the dominant ideology of academia today and the dominant ideology of the State are exactly the same? Of course they are... they're causally connected. (Where do the "technocrats" in technocracy come from? Certainly not the farm!)
As for this being "conspiracy" theory... no, it's just an understanding of how the world actually works. It may happen to explain this opinion of mine, but that's only because as a ground fact of the current world it explains lots of things. Academics wield power through the State. It's clear as daylight... it would be some sort of bizarre theory that they don't. What would that even look like?
Oh yes, the dominant ideology of academia is the same as that of the state, which is why academics universally agree that anthropogenic global warming is real while the government can't even agree on whether climate is changing at all, let alone the cause. This must be why universities are chronically underfunded and professors are constantly scrambling for their next research grant. This must be why roughly nobody in the top levels of government has so much as a PhD. The tight link between the two explains why governments persist in outlawing drugs even though research shows it's more effective to legalize them. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
Looks to me like Lenin graduated from university but didn't go anywhere near an advanced degree. I'm not sure which Nazis you're referring to but I'm not aware of a particularly large number of university professors among the ranks of the top Nazis.
I agree with mikeash on this. It's not the academics that are committing crimes. And anyway, I'm tired of people telling me whether a certain idea is right or wrong. I just want to hear the evidence, and I think that's how most "academics" are.
Sure, academic don't rove about with black helicopters and guns, but academia has the ear of industry, politics and government for good reason. Applied academics has the ability to predict outcomes, grow economies, win wars and generate massive revenues.
But it also has the ability to go horribly wrong. It's undeniable that Nazi eugenicists modeled their ideology after the American eugenics movement, encouraged by American academics and NGOs.
Some academics have the ear of powerful people. Some don't. Like in any other field.
Academia tends to be where far-out ideas come from, just because it's an environment that encourages it. Some of those ideas will be discovered by people in power and used to shape policy. Other will not. To blame academia for this or point to this process as evidence that academics are powerful seems an awful lot like being afraid of language because language can be used to convince people to do bad things.
I agree. Language is just a form of communication, it can be used or misused.
It would be a fiction to downplay the power of academics in modern society. Academics has the power to mold and frame the minds of the next generation of leaders, alter government policy and to influence an entire populace from childhood.
I see your point that academics has been demonized at times, however I think it's more appropriate to judge it on outcomes.
You don't understand, recognizing sex differences leads to industrial-scale mass murder, just like it has in every human society that has ever recognized sex differences. Wake up sheeple!
The deep-rooted fear of academia isn't that the masses may do something stupid with the idea of gender differences... it's the fear that they, the academics, will do something stupid. (Again. Although, not the same literal people, of course.)