Might as well get a tattoo on your forehead that says: ‘I am an idiot’
No, they are not idiots. As the start of the thread noted, they are voting their own perceived self interest.
University employees are not affected by recession. People still go to college, professors' research grants are still paid, etc.
What would flip them out would be some common-sense fixes for out-of-control university costs, like making student loans dischargable at bankruptcy AND making such defaulted loans chargeable to the university. Pretty damn quick, colleges would stop accepting people who would be unlikely to be self-supporting in their fields after graduation, and would stop allowing people to major in "womyns studies" unless they paid tuition "cash in advance".