This is not something "the masses" do, because "the masses" do not have the ability to successfully run with an idea and gather enough power to impose it.
It's not just the holocaust, either. There's a huge history of 20th-century "social engineering" that rather a lot of people would rather forget, because it pretty uniformly went badly. See also "eugenics" for another reason that academics are afraid to think too hard about how people may be different or how genes may determine things about people... and not entirely without reason. "The masses" did not impose eugenics. In fact a lot of eugenics had to be hidden from the masses.
With power comes the power to screw up. Academics have a lot of power. It would be strange if they'd never screwed up.
Express all the humorous strawmen you like. How do you think these things happen? In the 20th century, the only bad social engineering event I can think of that could even remotely be considered the outgrowth of a broad movement of the masses is sort of Nazi-ism. Everything else was led by somebody with an idea from academia. "The masses" don't originate many ideas, and in the era of the all-powerful State (which the 20th century is firmly in), "the masses" don't run around committing genocide, or doing any of the things they may have done in previous social systems, because all that power is now reserved to the State.
And the State and academia have always been attached at the hip, as they are today. How else would it be? Do you think it's some sort of bizarre coincidence that the dominant ideology of academia today and the dominant ideology of the State are exactly the same? Of course they are... they're causally connected. (Where do the "technocrats" in technocracy come from? Certainly not the farm!)
As for this being "conspiracy" theory... no, it's just an understanding of how the world actually works. It may happen to explain this opinion of mine, but that's only because as a ground fact of the current world it explains lots of things. Academics wield power through the State. It's clear as daylight... it would be some sort of bizarre theory that they don't. What would that even look like?
Looks to me like Lenin graduated from university but didn't go anywhere near an advanced degree. I'm not sure which Nazis you're referring to but I'm not aware of a particularly large number of university professors among the ranks of the top Nazis.
Sure, academic don't rove about with black helicopters and guns, but academia has the ear of industry, politics and government for good reason. Applied academics has the ability to predict outcomes, grow economies, win wars and generate massive revenues.
But it also has the ability to go horribly wrong. It's undeniable that Nazi eugenicists modeled their ideology after the American eugenics movement, encouraged by American academics and NGOs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics#Origins_in_the_w...
Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Even a bad idea.
Academia tends to be where far-out ideas come from, just because it's an environment that encourages it. Some of those ideas will be discovered by people in power and used to shape policy. Other will not. To blame academia for this or point to this process as evidence that academics are powerful seems an awful lot like being afraid of language because language can be used to convince people to do bad things.
It would be a fiction to downplay the power of academics in modern society. Academics has the power to mold and frame the minds of the next generation of leaders, alter government policy and to influence an entire populace from childhood.
I see your point that academics has been demonized at times, however I think it's more appropriate to judge it on outcomes.
Now I'm confused. Not really, because this thread is nonsense -- confirmation bias mixed with absurdity.
The deep-rooted fear of academia isn't that the masses may do something stupid with the idea of gender differences... it's the fear that they, the academics, will do something stupid. (Again. Although, not the same literal people, of course.)