We wonder if Don Buchholz has as much contempt for his own employees at SWS Group Inc. in Dallas as he does for the faculty at the University of North Texas in Denton. If so, we feel fortunate not to work for either one.

Buchholz is chairman of the board of directors of SWS, a Dallas holding company that owns brokerage houses, insurance companies and banks — all manner of high-rolling financial institutions. He also is a member of the UNT Board of Regents, a post to which he was appointed in 2007 by Gov. Rick Perry.

In the latter capacity, Buchholz deposed in Thursday’s paper about a UNT Faculty Senate survey that gave Chancellor Lee Jackson a 1.37 approval rating on a scale of 5, a ranking that lodged about halfway between “poor” and “fair.”

Buchholz defended Jackson, a perfectly proper position for a member of the Board of Regents to take, but he did it by heaping scorn on the UNT faculty, and its survey.

“I’d be upset if he [Jackson] got a high rating,” Buchholz told the Record-Chronicle’s Candace Carlisle. “He’s in a position of authority, and they [faculty members] aren’t going to like it. If they like what he’s doing, he’s doing something wrong.”

There are several ways to interpret Buchholz’s remark, none of which reflect much credit upon him. He might be saying that academics are a bunch of pin-headed intellectuals whose opinions are not to be trusted by those of us in the “real world.”

There is a lot of that going around; there always has been.

We heard it as a child from know-nothing goobers in the town barbershop as they condemned Darwinism in particular and “book-learnin’” in general. We heard it from racist rabble-rouser George Wallace when he parlayed his Alabama segregationist credentials into a failed run for the presidency in 1968. Wallace said intellectuals didn’t have enough sense to park their bicycles straight. We hear it yet today from people who are not only ignorant, but proudly and aggressively ignorant.

Then again, Buchholz could have been speaking in a wider context, a context that treats all employees, academics or not, as unworthy of any respect or consideration.

That was the way Southern plantation owners felt about their slaves before the Civil War; it was the way the Industrial-Age robber barons felt about the immigrant workers who built their railroads.

It was the way the top officers of Enron felt about their employees only a few years ago as they urged them to buy Enron stock even as they were selling off their own in anticipation of the downfall they themselves had orchestrated.

Yes, academics are an impatient and contentious bunch, even in the best of times; that is the nature of curious, skeptical and highly educated people. They would, as the old saying goes, complain if they were hung with a new rope.

But the faculty members at UNT have good reason to be unhappy with Lee Jackson. He forced out a dynamic and popular president of the Denton campus. He has moved the UNT system offices from Denton to Dallas. He has centralized the university’s human resources and information technology departments.

To UNT faculty members, these are ominous indications that Jackson has shifted his focus, and his priorities, from the university’s historic location in Denton, where he has never lived, to Dallas, where he was accustomed to wheeling and dealing in the political realm.

This may indeed be UNT’s future, and Don Buchholz, who also lives in Dallas, may support it wholeheartedly, and that’s his right.

But a great many dedicated — and educated — faculty members on UNT’s campus feel differently, and with good reason. Don Buchholz can dismiss them as so many sharecroppers and gandy dancers if he wants to, but it makes us wonder how he feels about the skilled, highly trained professionals at SWS who have made him a rich man.