Are professors better than anyone else?

There is a new book out this year on Victor Kugler, the man who hid Anne Frank and her family, while simultaneously running her father Otto’s two businesses while the Frank family was hiding. I learned about it from a review I just read in the International Jerusalem Post (the original review is here). Titled Victor Kugler: The Man Who Hid Anne Frank, it was written by Rick Kardonne, based on a manuscript of interviews with Kugler by Eda Shapiro. Kugler paid for his heroism. When the Franks and their friends were found, Kugler was arrested, but Kugler’s heroism did not end. The Jerusalem Post review notes:

Kardonne details Kugler’s eight months in prisons, concentration and forced-labor camps, where his quick wits and deep Lutheran faith sustained him. As an office boy for the German commander of one such camp, Kugler daringly fudged roll-call numbers to obtain more food for the starved workers.
The Jerusalem Post review has this curious bit.

As general manager of Otto Frank’s two Amsterdam businesses, it had fallen to Kugler to shield Frank and his wife and two daughters from the approaching German forces. At the same time, Kugler accepted responsibility for keeping Frank’s firms afloat. Both tasks entailed overwhelming risks and difficult logistics.
Kugler, an Austrian-born naval veteran who had moved to Amsterdam after World War I, “was neither a diplomat nor a prominent industrialist with connections. He was not an academic… Rather, this man was an ordinary business manager with a simple, humane conscience.”

Here are two pictures. On the left is Victor Kugler, “ordinary business manager”; on the right is Martin Heidegger, famous philosophy professor at Freiburg and, like many German professors, a loyal Nazi.
Remember those images, remember who they were, the next time you read from some pompous ass professor something like this.

Also, you know, if you’re a go-along-to-get-along type, if you don’t really like to argue, if you’d rather be employed than right, business is a better place for you than academia — and it pays better, man.
Yeah, tell that to “ordinary business manager” Victor Kugler.