Depends on which academic you meet, I think. Then again, there was one woman on the show a few months back who described herself as a housewife, and I'm ashamed to say that after her first couple of minutes of introduction I figured she was going to be useless. She promptly when and answered 10 or 11 questions correctly in the first minute, fairly sure she went on to win too. Just goes to show how wrong first impressions can be.
General knowledge is of course not correlated with going to university, but neither does it follow that the more academic you are, the less common sense (or general knowledge) you have. I never understand why people seem to insist on this.