Any budding sociology grad student looking for an interesting issue and associated case study on which to build a doctoral thesis need look no further than the environs of Oceanside. While many academics bemoan the apparently lesser esteem in which modern society holds professors, researchers and other brainiacs compared to years past, few seem to want to figure out the why of the issue.

I give you MiraCosta College.

Faculty members at the two-year community college have been acting the part of spoiled children of late, stomping their feet and pouting over the school's investigation of an alleged scheme that, if accurately described, allowed a handful of school employees and others to use campus grounds to grow plants sold for private profit.

Perhaps the investigation wasn't perfect - what human endeavor is? - but it wasn't intrinsically crooked, as a plot to use public property for private gain surely is. Would it kill the faculty members to admit that, if true, the palm tree scam was an immoral rip-off of public resources? And the alleged cover-up - if true - was even more wrong?

A no-confidence vote in the president just makes the faculty look like a bunch of overpaid, underworked crybabies. Full-time faculty at MiraCosta average more than $100,000 per year, according to the National Education Association (tinyurl.com/yspvv8) - significantly more than the majority of working stiffs in the college's district whose taxes pay those salaries.

Those periods in history when university and college professors have been held up as paragons of intellectual excellence have been those periods, I would argue, when they held themselves above the fray.

When the professors are demanding that the president of the college be fired and the elected board - the folks hired by the taxpayers to run the joint - be replaced, well, it's pretty apparent that the MiraCosta faculty is not above the fray.

Of course, the ideal of the university as a place of pure knowledge and learning was never reality. Universities and colleges have always been places in which societies have inculcated their best and brightest with said societies' values as well as knowledge.

But in the years since the baby boomer generation attended college, we've seen the ascendancy of the idea that the proper role of colleges and universities in the West is to reject European values, that professors should be unfettered to teach whatever they want in their classrooms, with no interference from administrators or, God forbid, the taxpayers.

When the faculty at MiraCosta voted "no confidence" in the elected board, they implicitly voted "no confidence" in the voters who elected the members of the board; they voted "no confidence" in the folks who pay their salaries.

You can't really blame the voters if they return those feelings, now can you?

- Contact columnist Jim Trageser at (760) 631-6628 or jtrageser@nctimes.com.