Public DomainRetiring the Nutty Professor
The movie The Nutty Professor, both the original 1963 version starring Jerry Lewis and the successful remake by Eddie Murphy in 1996, is about a genius professor, obese but kind, who develops a potion that turns him into a handsome, manipulative womanizer.
Today, the education industry is no longer marginal and the university faculty no longer fits the awkward-brainiac stereotype. Professors have become powerful politically — they are the core of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and they predictably hold Leftist views, treating us to spectacles such as the University of Michigan faculty senate accusing Secretary of War Pete Hegseth of “war crimes.” Much of the Leftist elite, in fact, comes from academia — for example, Sen. Elizabeth Warren taught at Harvard Law School for 20 years, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the son of a famous radical academic, who teaches at Columbia University.
Meanwhile, Luigi Mangione, the Left’s favorite alleged assassin, has two degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution. The parents of Katie Wilson, Seattle’s new socialist mayor, are both professors. Globally, elite university graduates have been the primary promoters of the most hysterical climate change theses, epitomized by British politician Ed Miliband, an Oxford graduate and Labour MP, who has served as the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy Security since 2024, and who is clearly oblivious to the economic consequences of his “net zero” fanaticism.
However absurd its beliefs, what academia thinks and how it imposes its ideology matters. Leftist professors are shaping generations, sending youth into the world spouting the standard progressive script and displaying proud ignorance of the achievements of Western Civilization.
Virtually no major job category is more uniform in ideology. In 1990, 42% of professors identified as “liberal” or “far Left,” according to survey data by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. By 2014, that number had jumped to 60%. Today, roughly three-quarters of faculty are left of center, a trend that feeds on itself in hiring; even moderates are rare. Since 2002, at least 70% of political contributions from academics have gone to Democrats; the University of California faculty and staff sent $10 million to Democrats in 2004, but less than $300,000 to Republicans. Even at DePaul University, America’s largest Catholic university, almost 90% of contributions went to the Left.
This political skewing has the effect of turning universities into ideological re-education camps. For example, prominent schools of journalism, including those at Columbia and the University of Southern California, have moved away from teaching the fundamentals of reporting and now openly advance a social justice agenda. This enforced conformity isn’t good for students, or the quality of the pedagogy.
Even some progressives, like the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, recognize that “students are less likely to get a good education, and faculty members are likely to learn less from one another, if there is a prevailing political orthodoxy.”
At the university level, students coming to class, particularly in the liberal arts, are deficient in knowledge of such things as the failure of socialism in the USSR or the repressive nature of contemporary China. After all, socialism’s lethal failures are inconvenient facts for Marxist professors, who have, notes author Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, “surrendered to revolutionary kitsch.” Progressives would rather accuse Israelis, Americans, and Britons of genocide, while ignoring the fact that the greatest mass murderers in history did so under the Red banner.
In this sense, today’s academics resemble Medieval clergy — or Marxist propagandists in the old USSR — more than open-minded and flexible intellectuals. Church authorities in the Middle Ages trained clergy in the defense of orthodox doctrine in order to combat heresies, a trend that also infected the universities of the time. The University of Paris became a staunch guardian of religious orthodoxy, and in the 1300s, it held a conclave to affirm the supposed reality that demons were afflicting society.
Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com, follow him on Substack and Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: publicity photo of Jerry Lewis and Stella Stevens for The Nutty Professor movie (1963) via Wikimedia in Public Domain.
Public Domain
