I spoke with Hacker about how American students are being neglected by celebrity professors, shortchanged by rising tuitions, and led astray by college football.

This book has a sense of urgency about it. What were you and Claudia seeing around you that compelled you to blow the whistle?

I've been teaching for a long time—I won't say how long. In the past 10 or 15 years, I've seen a tremendous over-professionalization of the academic world. Professors are identifying with their arcane disciplines, the minutiae, the esoteric research. Schools get status by bringing on professors who are star researchers, star scholars. That's all we really know about Caltech or MIT or Stanford. We don't really know about the quality of undergraduate teaching at any of these places. And it's the students who suffer.

But those star faculty members do attract students to the campuses you named. So there's a reason universities keep hiring them.

Well, there are two ways to pick a college. One is to go to a prestigious college, and when you graduate the world will know you went to Princeton or Stanford. It doesn't matter what happened in the classroom as long as you have that brand behind you. Claudia and I were up at Harvard talking to students, and they said they get nothing from their classes, but that doesn't matter. They're smart already—they can breeze through college. The point is that they're going to be Harvard people when they come out.

The second reason to go to college is get a good liberal arts education. We argue that you can get a better education at second or third tier colleges. Have you ever heard of Linfield College? It's in a little town called McMinnville, Oregon. We were very impressed with the campus. The professors care. They spend time with the students. The same is true in a place called Hendrix College in Arkansas, or Earlham College in Indiana. They provide a good education because they don't expect professors to do research.

That's a strong theme in the book: professors spend their time doing research and teaching relatively few classes, and students end up footing the bill. Are you against the idea of faculty research altogether, or do you think some research deserves to be funded by universities?

The problem is that there are just too many publications and too many people publishing. This is true even in the hard sciences. If there's a research project on genetics in a lab, they will take certain findings and break them into eight different articles just so each researcher can get more stuff on his or her resume.

And many of the publications are too long. A book on Virginia Woolf could be a 30-page article. Somebody did a count of how many publications had been written on Virginia Woolf in the past 15 years. The answer is several thousand. Really? Who needs this? But it's awfully difficult to say, "Here's knowledge we don't need!" It sounds like book burning, doesn't it? What we'd say is that on the scale of priorities, we find undergraduate teaching to be more important than all the research being done.