If you spend any time at academic conferences, you realize that their biggest target is not conservatives (and realize they have vanquished), who they barely acknowledge, but “neoliberals.”
Few at Columbia University would object if you called them the best and the brightest, yet they are no more incandescent than the rest of the public when it comes to enumerating their first amendment freedoms.
Perhaps if we still had the draft, professors would understand the difference between soldiers who put their lives at risk every day and reporters who don’t.