I read Slate magazine’s review of Louis Menand’s current bestseller on academia in America “The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University,” and I can’t help but agree with the reviewer’s conclusion. Menand’s book says contemporary academia is corrupt because of the emphasis on peer review. I haven’t bought this one, but I’m reading Menand’s “Metaphysical Club,” which chronicles a post-Civil War engineering boom and how America first fostered its inventive society. Although I’m a fan of the “Metaphysical Club,” I am not so fond of “The Marketplace of Ideas.”

Menand complains that professors are not accountable to anyone except other academics and the for-professors-by-professors academic culture walls off the ordinary public. This creates an academic culture of complacency, which ultimately leads to an absence of public intellectuals.

It means professors who have important work never end up showing the public the fruits of their labor — the academics simply assume they would not understand it anyway. The reviewer critiques Menand, saying Menand, who teaches at Harvard and writes for the New Yorker Magazine, is exactly the sort of across-the-aisle public intellectual that he is searching for. He is a contradiction of his own problem.

But attacking academia is as easy as shooting fish in barrels. Opinions are like professors — everybody’s got one. The reason there are so many attacks on academia is because it is the nexus of ideas, and academia affects everyone (without seeming to help anyone). It doesn’t help that everyone thinks these paltry four (to seven) years are supposed to be the prime of life. This means all of your fifty-somethings like professor Menand are ready and raring to fight this battle.

The case in point might as well be our parents, who are more ready for school than most of us. I want to tell my parents, geez, if you like it so much, you can do the work for me — I wish. Nevertheless, there’s always the urban legend of the mom who does her daughter’s work for her. This is the concept of “helicopter parenting” — these parents hover. It was identified by Barrett Seaman, the retired editor of “Time” magazine, when he wrote his now-fleeting “Binge: What your college students won’t tell you,” where Seamen puts way too much blame on students and the culture of drinking. Books like Menand’s and Barrett’s are shock-jock literature — they are fad books that quickly disappear into the library catacombs.

The reason professors see the problem as being academic is probably because they are from academia, as is the case of Menand, who works as a full-time professor and a full-time non-fiction author. When would he have time to research anything except for what he is doing? Any one of his careers takes a 50-hour work week.

Critiquing the darned youth is at least as old as the 1920s, when our great-grandparents were experimenting with jazz and fiscal idiocy exactly like our parents do today.

There are two great entries into the lexicon of academic generation culture shock. One is Allen Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” which combines the call to moral responsibility for students with the philosophical reasons why they should do as he says. The second is Charles Taylor’s “The Ethics of Authenticity,” whereupon he answers Bloom and defends a culture that celebrates individuality, which he calls authenticity.

In the meantime, we should stick to our own books, and perhaps Menand should reconsider his.