Erm... I wouldn't say that the average liberal feels that there's much they don't know, and that they might be wrong about a lot of things. (I wouldn't say that the average conservative is like that, either.)
I believe that academia is the perfect place for the formation of cliques which over time exclude non-believers. Right now there's a powerful liberal clique in academia - but over time it could be replaced by anything, really. At some point eugenics were all the rage, today it's taboo, etc. And since educated people pass through the academia, and receive a lot of information filtered through the leading clique, they're likely to share the clique's views. (Whether, on top of that, educated people also simply exhibit less critical thinking and original opinions based on their own experience than the average person I don't know; I wouldn't be surprised by it being either true or false, I can certainly construct a believable narrative explaining both possibilities.)
Speaking of eugenics and such... how do I put this, in hindsight people reevaluate their ideas wrt what's scary, and the British Labor and Liberal parties' insistence that Nazi Germany wasn't particularly scary seems to me to be a pretty good example. I think this shows that "you're generally not threatened of things you understand" sometimes is less accurate than "you're not threatened of things that you completely misunderstand, while those who do understand them are right to be scared shitless about them." And sometimes, like in this case, "you" are more liberal than "them", and sometimes it's the reverse.
I believe that academia is the perfect place for the formation of cliques which over time exclude non-believers. Right now there's a powerful liberal clique in academia - but over time it could be replaced by anything, really. At some point eugenics were all the rage, today it's taboo, etc. And since educated people pass through the academia, and receive a lot of information filtered through the leading clique, they're likely to share the clique's views. (Whether, on top of that, educated people also simply exhibit less critical thinking and original opinions based on their own experience than the average person I don't know; I wouldn't be surprised by it being either true or false, I can certainly construct a believable narrative explaining both possibilities.)
Speaking of eugenics and such... how do I put this, in hindsight people reevaluate their ideas wrt what's scary, and the British Labor and Liberal parties' insistence that Nazi Germany wasn't particularly scary seems to me to be a pretty good example. I think this shows that "you're generally not threatened of things you understand" sometimes is less accurate than "you're not threatened of things that you completely misunderstand, while those who do understand them are right to be scared shitless about them." And sometimes, like in this case, "you" are more liberal than "them", and sometimes it's the reverse.