The Billionaires Spending a Fortune to Lure Scientists Away from Universities

There’s a difference between actual leftism and social liberalism. A lot of the members of the board of directors at those universities have close ties to big financial institutions and the department of defense. So yeah, as you’ve noticed they don’t actually care about regular people except to the extent that it makes them look good.

When big corporations espouse socially liberal ideas, they’re chasing public sentiment, not the other way around.

University governance isn't dominated by left wing anything. Liberal at the very most, but this sort of ruthless optimization of labor is fully compatible with liberalism.

And universities as institutions are extremely conservative in the non-political sense. Their mission is to maintain and reproduce a certain relationship to knowledge production. As such they highly prioritize the power of the institution, even and maybe especially against the power of the individuals working within it, who are otherwise well-situated to disrupt it.