University President Steven Knapp penned a book review in Wednesday’s New York Times, arguing against many of the points made in a recently published book titled “How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It.”

Knapp agreed with the book’s authors on a few of the points, saying they had relevant criticisms of “the narrow self-interestedness of academic departments; the greed of faculty members and administrators alike; the near-universal hypertrophy of “the athletics incubus”; unfunded government mandates; lifetime employment for pampered professors (thanks to the combination of tenure and Congressional abolition of mandatory retirement); and the demands of students and their parents for frivolous extras (driving what the authors call “the amenities arms race”).”

Yet Knapp said the authors of the book fail to see the value of professors who are also engaged in research.

From the piece:

Have they spoken with undergraduates who have enjoyed the privilege of assisting a top investigator in an active, federally financed laboratory? In my own anecdotal experience, the best of those students, far from shutting themselves away in a narrow specialization, are very likely spending their time outside the lab in life-expanding service activities that, again, were quite beyond the ken of undergraduates in earlier generations.

Read the piece here.