Educators aren"t smug, they’re bored. You would be too if you were on your 632nd bunch of young adults who think what they just saw on Tik Tok is the epitome of high culture.
Educators wouldn’t be bored, of course, if they could exchange ideas with students. But running them through classes like a cattle drive is boring. And reading their work when they haven’t been challenged and just dashed something off after reading Wikipedia is boring.