It’s always seemed plain to me—there’s not normally any real money in academia, from the conservative point of view, and they don’t see it as dignified. A conservative making a career in scholarship regards himself as a failure—a taker rather than a maker, feeding at somebody else’s trough. A real man is a participant in the creative destruction, not a mere observer. With exceptions in medicine, law, and maybe economics, but medicine is too hard, and the other departments are like “why would you do that? Sociology? Art history? Marine biology?”