Prof thinks intellectual sneers are in poor taste
In an essay in Times Higher Education, Dennis Hayes - who admits to being an academic - thinks that the public's low opinion of academics will not change until the academics open themselves up to more active debate:
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Academic ideas will continue to be arbitrary because arbitrariness needs to be checked by discussion. But before pointing the finger of blame at an apathetic public, academics should look closely at their own behaviour. At academic conferences, there is little discussion; there are hundreds of papers but few questions. Academics who intend to engage with the public and presume to tell people how they should act and think ought first to put their own house in order and give more time to debate, which means fewer papers and more talking. An academia focused on narrow research rather than wider debate is a poor model for any public.
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Hayes' target is academics who appear on talk shows = the talking heads that sink TV ratings faster than gravity.
Understanding the decline of academic discussion
The Christian apologist Josh McDowell has observed that it used to be the case when he gave campus lectures that the objections would be of the kind "How do you know that is true?". That changed. There came a time when those objections had been replaced by variations of "What gives you the right to say that?" People were no longer wrestling with what is true, but rather with whether anyone had a right to make claims to know objective truth. Objective truth, what is "true" for all of us, had been largely supplanted by strictly subjective views, "what is true for you".
In the post-modern culture, sincere and rational debates about objective truth have been increasingly considered pointless, since each person's understanding is viewed as their own construction. In place of the search for truth, one has attempts to deconstruct works to merely dissect language as an exercise of influencing others and seeking power.
In the excellent and recommended book The Wedge of Truth, Phillip Johnson's incisive analysis unveils the progressive devolving effect of the materialist view, which has no defensible stopping point prior to the conclusion that conscious mind and the conscious self is an illusion. It is not just that Darwin's universal acid eats away until we are no more than selfish genes using memes for advantage. One doesn't even have a defensible basis for claiming one's materialistically induced conscious understanding of reality is objectively true or rational.
"At academic conferences, there is little discussion; there are hundreds of papers but few questions."
The more one recognizes the full effects of a materialist world view, what is left to discuss? Why should one bother with questions about the memes of someone else's genes? Everyone is free to pick whatever construction they prefer. If it works for you...
Rational discussion, questions, and debate have genuine meaning and value (not merely rhetorical leverage) only if, contrary to the materialist outcome, the mind has trustworthy access to objective reality and truth may be genuinely sought and found.
Whereas materialism holds that matter/energy is primary and mind/thought is derivative, there is an alternative that recognizes that mind/thought is more fundamental than matter/energy, and that intelligence precedes even the physical universe. Within that perspective, our own conscious minds are not just an illusion constructed by matter.
That changes everything.