(I'm afraid that your focus on the untrustworthiness of tenured scholars makes no sense to me. If anything, it is the untenured scholars, whether inside or outside academia, whose job security depends on pandering to their audience.)
On a tangential note, it is my impression (admittedly based on relatively little evidence and perhaps biased) that getting tenure nowadays involves severe enough scrutiny that it really is extremely hard for anyone who harbors disreputable beliefs to get through the process, even if he tries to hide them. I can think of some examples of people who got tenure two, three, or more decades ago doing uncontroversial work and then proceeded to voice disreputable beliefs once shielded by it, to the great frustration and anger of their academic colleagues. However, I can't think of any more recent examples.
If this is true, then it might be that aside from these old exceptions who are nearing retirement or already retired, it is more probable to see a disreputable belief expressed as a self-destructive act of an untenured academic than by a tenured academic who takes advantage of the privilege to speak his mind -- since the latter is practically guaranteed to be rigorously selected for sincere belief in the respectable consensus.
Also, tenured academics still have huge incentives to fall in line with the respectable consensus. Unlike the untenured ones, for them it's more about carrots than sticks, but the incentives are still there.
On the big issues, race differences, gender differences, sexual preferences, anti communism and islamophobia, the official truth held by the tenured is complex, subtle, and nuanced. They are both permitted and forbidden to acknowledge statistical differences between groups, permitted to acknowledge these differences in some ways and some circumstances and not in other ways and other circumstances, permitted to make deductions from statistical differences to particular cases in some ways and some circumstances and not in other ways and other circumstances...
"In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society."
It is presently a commonplace of Western culture that women are worse at spatial reasoning than men, and this is commonly attributed to intrinsic biological differences.
It turns out this may be highly questionable. A study in PNAS studied two nearby tribes in northeast India, one with a strongly patriarchal organisation, one with a strongly matriarchal organisation. Both share the same agrarian diet and lifestyle and DNA tests indicate they are closely related.
In the patriarchal society, women did noticeably worse on spatial reasoning. In the matriarchal society, women and men did about the same.
The authors carefully do not overstate their results, claiming only that they demonstrated that culture influences spatial performance "in the task that we study." However, this promisingly suggests quite a bit of room for improvement of measurable aspects of intelligence may be feasible with proper attention to culture and nurture.
What measurable aspects of intelligence do you attribute to genetic causes? Can you test it this well? How would you fix it and help people be all they can be?
News coverage: ArsTechnica.