They mostly just want people to bias confirm them. Like everyone else.

I was in academia for 10 years. One reason I left was the deeper I got the more depressed I was how most of them where anti-intellectual. They were only pro-intellectual for ideas that supported their pre-existing worldview and biases. They often labeled anything outside of that worldview, as hostile and stupid and awful and impermissible.

I remember once in a political theory class I dared to suggest that maybe the uneducated Amish and other such religion folks were not ignorant racist pathetic fools. Holy shit, the blowback I got. I had people come up to me and go 'you can't be serious that you'd actually think those people are anyway equal to educated atheistic science following people like us'.

Wowzers. And when I followed up my mentioning to this person, that while I was not Amish, my upbringing involve some similarities, and yet here I was. They never spoke to me again, because I was a dirty ignorant peasant to them.

many people use 'intellect' as a way to conceal their incredibly social biases, as in, you can't be a real intellectual or on 'their level' if you weren't born that way, or have a certain level of degree. As if say, community college professors can't ever be intellectuals, because they are too lowly in status and if they were intellectuals, they most certainly would have jobs at more prestigious places.