Your point falls flat when we consider the student loan emabrrassment the professors have (with similar snide elegance) overlooked.

To clarify, the shoemaker's customers in your analogy (the students) have been wearing worse shoes for much longer.

There is a sense that liberal academics assume, which purports that they carry the torch of revolution or something like this. The notion, however, lives only in the academic professorial abstract and fails to materialize outside of it. This torch is an academic torch, not a proletariat torch, not a working class torch. This is a bourjois torch.