Via Instapundit, when did Matthew Yglesias become a voice of sanity? He writes:

… if all the people with degrees are on the same side of certain big moral and political questions, it’s going to be very hard for them to draw the line between actual expert knowledge and beliefs they happen to hold. Perhaps the greatest recent example of this was tons and tons of public health academics joining a sign-on letter in favor of the George Floyd protests. Note they didn’t just say something like “outdoor activity is relatively safe and we encourage everyone to do things outdoors that are important to them (church services, social justice protests, gatherings with family).” Instead, they decided to endorse the agenda of the protests. . . .

This surely did approximately nothing to actually advance anti-racism causes (who cares what public health academics have to say about this?) but a great deal to burn the credibility of public health academics in the eyes of a huge swathe of the population.

A dimension to add is that people can gain educated credentials without being well educated.  For many, higher education has simply become a way to claim default authority over others.