We teach our children to study hard, do well, get into a good college and become whatever they dream of becoming. We teach them that if they follow the path, there will be a pot of gold at the end. And statistically, that’s generally true. with a long list of caveats. So why are there so many radicalized, angry, miserable Ph.D.s out there?

In August, Michael Isaacson, an adjunct instructor of economics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, wrote on Twitter, “Some of y’all might think it sucks being an anti-fascist teaching at John Jay College but I think it’s a privilege to teach future dead cops.” Though he later said he was not wishing for his students’ deaths, but merely predicting some would die, his post was roundly condemned. He received death threats and was suspended from his job, ostensibly in the interest of campus safety.

There have been similar cases in recent weeks. A sociologist holding a temporary position at the University of Tampa was fired after tweeting that Hurricane Harvey was karmic payback for Republican-voting Texans. Officials at California State University, Fresno, dismissed a history lecturerfor tweeting that “Trump must hang.” And an adjunct instructor in gender studies — who had already been fired from Rutgers — lost his fall employment offer from Montclair State University after the revelation that he’d tweeted about his wish to see President Trump shot.

This gives a somewhat false impression. It’s not that these aren’t accurate examples, but a few anecdotes don’t make for pervasive craziness. According to Colby College sociology prof, Neil Gross, these examples share one common theme, they’re all adjuncts.

In American academia there are two tiers of employment. The first consists of professors on the tenure track or already tenured. Once they’ve proved themselves as teachers and researchers, their jobs are secure. The second tier is everyone else: lecturers who might be hired full time for a semester, but with no promise of continued employment; graduate teaching assistants; post-docs who work in labs; and instructors brought on part time to teach a class or two.

And what’s wrong with the second tier?

The pay isn’t good. Although there’s considerable variation depending on the nature of the appointment, on average adjunct instructors receive only $1,000 for every course credit they teach. Most college courses are three or four credits, and full-time teaching loads pretty much max out at five classes a semester (at community colleges). You can do the math.

So just be a tenure-track prof rather than an adjunct? Well, that’s not as easy as it sounds. As with law schools, universities are cranking out as many Ph.D.s as will pay the freight, without regard to whether there is any place for them to go afterward. Colleges, never missing a trick to stretch that scarce tuition dollar as far as it will go, hire these over-educated, underpaid, readily-available widgets at a pittance of what a tenured prof will cost.

Some adjuncts turn to alternative means to make the rent. Others, according to Gross, get angry and blame capitalism, politics, and institutions for ending up with a raw deal.

But there’s reason to believe widespread reliance on adjunct faculty may encourage the very radicalism conservatives fear. Social scientists have found that when aspiring intellectuals face highly restricted employment opportunities, they often take refuge in extreme politics.

This falls shy of a reason. Obviously, correlation doesn’t prove causation, but more to the point, it ignores extreme politics by tenured profs, reaction to inadequately woke profs by colleges, and one additional shared trait by the proffered examples. They’re all humanities types. See any engineers in the cabal?

Gross blames the poor treatment of adjuncts for their anger, resentment and frustration, which he proposes leads them to radical politics.

Frustrated that their long investments in education and cultural cultivation haven’t paid off, intellectuals in such societies train their anger — and ideas — at the economic and political systems (and social groups) they hold responsible. Professor Karabel cited the example of Germany in the 1930s, when a slow-moving academic labor market increased the appeal of Nazism for a surprising number of underemployed intellectuals.

The same situation can breed support for radical movements of the left. Poor job prospects for American thinkers during the Depression helped draw many into socialism or communism. More recently, the sociologist Ruth Milkman found that well-educated millennials were overrepresented among Occupy Wall Street activists. These young people had spent their lives diligently preparing to enter the knowledge economy and became disillusioned when, after the financial crisis, it all seemed to be crashing down.

The irony of using the word “intellectuals” as a descriptor of people who followed the mundane path of the American dream, that education begets a good job, a decent living, a guaranteed middle class future with two cars and a dog, is striking. If they were all that intellectual, they would have figured out that there are only so many positions for gender-studies docs, or that icebergs are natural phenomena and have nothing to do with the patriarchy.

None of this, however, proves Gross’ thesis, as universities are openly, and proudly, engaged in forced indoctrination of students to their flavor of good and woke people, soldiers in the fight for a progressive Utopia. At the Ph.D. level, it’s GIGO, student’s wearing Che t-shirts under their doctoral hoods meeting a world where economic forces don’t care about their feelings of social justice.

They can either blame the lie that put them there, or blame the society they’ve been taught is fraught with evil. Heck, if I were paid adjunct wages after doing everything I was told would earn me the American Dream of an endowed chair and tweed jacket, I would be furious too. Privilege ain’t what they said it would be.

There are a great many places to point the finger for these angry “intellectuals,” from parents to presidents, society to their college advisers. Academics, the ones who were lucky enough to get the tenure-track jobs, ridicule the “trade school” notion of education, but the thinkers aren’t doing all that well either. If only they thought about where they would end up before committing their futures to the hood, they might be too busy to be so angry.

Maybe they aren’t as intellectual as they want to believe they are. Maybe memorizing the book and internalizing radical beliefs isn’t the surest path to happiness. Or maybe they’re just the craziest of the class, the ones who can’t control their emotions and impulses. And still, they’re teaching students, even as adjuncts, whose wages are the joke of the campus janitors.