"As to the more specific point about collusion: in my experience the self-consciousness of "progressive" professors is largely limited to posturing.
Taking correct positions and denouncing the right things (combined with writing checks to elect Obama) establishes one's credentials. All of this is largely divorced from any self-critical examination of the conditions of production of one's own position. This shows up most clearly in the invisibility of the army of adjunct faculty at my and other campuses - the people whose exploited labor makes my own position as a relatively privileged, tenured professor possible."
Couldn't have put it better myself & reflects my experience of academia exactly.
It remains to be seen, as entire liberal arts departments are destroyed in the public colleges (languages, art history, comp lit, etc.), how the unemployed intelligentia reacts. Swing to the left? Swing to the right? (The Nazis were not a bunch of louts. The two professions that provided the most members where psychologists and gynecologists; and perhaps some of you remember the role that psychologists played in the incarceration and torture of the population in Paraguay (?)) And what about the faculty that is left behind? Swing to the left? or the Right? A continuing desire to sleep? Or the realization that one must awaken or be destroyed? A fascinating chapter in the sociology of knowledge is about to open.
Joanna