Or they just pick the view that benefits them, with no regard to how it affects others. Smart people definitely do better in a fuck you got mine economy than dumb people.
Given what I know about political infighting in the modern American academy though, I'd bet that the smart ones went to the politburo where they got to be the "who" and not the "whom" and it was the midwits at best who stuck around in the academy waiting to get shipped to the gulags for publishing something Stalin disliked.
In other words, realizing how the system actually works instead of naively believing how it's claimed to work is just another intelligence test.