What did you learn from this? He doesn't seem to have any facts except that ever more pages are published. He doesn't even bother to index the number of articles and papers published in different decades by the number of profs, which is certainly much higher now than in the 50's. Nor is there is no argument that what is published is bad or worse than what came before. One gets the impression that this is someone who is tired of his field and wants into politics.

At the end he suggests that all the time they spend on publishing -- not having proven that it is more than they spent in the 50's -- is somehow alienating profs. from their students. In this case he has no temporal data, only a dispiriting survey of the present, so his claim to "know" that the (unproven) increased absorption in publication is the cause of an (unproven, even undescribed) prof-student alienation is basically a lie.

He's probably right that what people write is no good; that would hold of most of what is written, period.

I looked into it recently, thinking about another critique of the depraved habits of 'academics', by which mostly humanities professors, and particularly English profs seemed to be meant -- and found that the salaries of the entire humanities faculty at the local big U. constituted slighly over 1% of the budget. Much, much less than the sports program...

Big university sports programs have positive ROI in the literal money sense. Spending more money on a football coach or basketball recruiting makes more money, not less, for the rest of the university.

It's like complaining that a university spends too much money on parking enforcement or tuition collection. Or that an Indian tribe spends too much money building casinos.