Here is a link to a good discussion of why most intellestuals and prefessors are leftists.

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2007/10/intellectuals_f.html

My observation based on discussions with Democrats and other socialists is that they see life as a zero-sum game. If one person does well, that must be at the expense of someone else. That this is not true is obvious if one compares the situation of poor people now with their situation 70 years ago, when I was born into a poor family. The poor are better off now than the middle class, or even the wealthy, were back then by almost any measure. For example even the middle class didn't have telephones; now even the poor have cell phones. Or consider health care. Rich people died if they got pneumonia as a consequence of a minor ailment, and I recall many people who did die. Now it is rare for anyone to die of pneumonia unless they have some severe underlying ailment such as lung cancer or AIDS. THere are hundreds of other examples, but this illustrates the general idea.