Professors are marginally more learned, exposed to information than most folks, is a better description. When your day is devoted to absorbing information instead of being a productive member of society you tend to gain a higher level of accumulated information.....intelligent, not hardly. I have not met very many professors that were smarter than i, more learned in their field of study, certainly, but not smarter.
Also, most of academia is comprised of liberals and thus are devoted to an ideology and the advancement of their ideology, facts and figures be damned.
In order to be able to absorb and understand certain things you need a higher than average level of intelligence. The functions of a professor don't directly entail intelligence but they do indirectly hint at intelligence, or some other quality sufficient to substitute for it. Again, my exact words were "at least marginally more intelligent". Meaning, if you take A: the average IQ of all people with a Masters in Business Administration, and B: the average IQ of all professors with a Masters in Business Administration, B > A. Likely not by a lot, and there will be outliers in both categories, but by some quantity.
You're also suggesting that the functions of a professor lack any aspect of value creation at all which is insane.
Most of academia is comprised of liberals for a number of reasons. First of all, liberalism is a more diverse range of ideologies than conservatism. Secondly, it is less principled, mostly as a consequence of purporting to deal more heavily in facts. Conservatives rest on concepts like rights, will argue that laissez faire economics is ideal on the basis of pure logic such as using Austrian Economic arguments, and will use these alleged first-principles as a substitute for observation or forcibly fit empirical data to these principles. Not to say that liberals don't ever do the same, but lacking principles, they have less opportunity to do so. Most liberal positions have a specious plausibility that appeals to those who are just smart enough to be concerned with ideas but either too lazy or not intelligent enough to think all of the way through them. This incidentally describes the vast majority of college students. Liberalism has been the traditional consequence of the development of academic thought, so this is also the background into which modern day intellectuals enter academia, although it admittedly doesn't account for why Liberalism took hold in colleges to begin with. Lastly, conservatives simply refuse to engage in direct debate on the points and issues modern academia is concerned with and so they've largely self-selected themselves out of all modern debates, opting instead to create insipid echo chambers where they can repeat the words of long dead men to each other to see who's memorized more of them. I guess that could be intelligence, in the same way an autistic obsession with trains can be intelligence. Although it's worth noting that liberals have done the same thing concerning very nearly all ideas about human nature, only without even using an echo chamber to preserve them, ostensibly in atonement for the atrocities of the 20th century, but ironically as with the conservative abdication, leaving these subjects to more dangerous minds as a consequence.
Besides which, being wrong isn't a sign of lack of intelligence. Much the opposite in this context; only the intelligent dare to explore and hence to misstep.
