In an essay published in last Sunday’s New York Times book-review section, Harvard president Drew Faust wrote some predictable blather about the supposed problem that higher-education “attainment” has remained at a plateau for years. Then she wrote some utter nonsense about the role of universities.

The blather concerned the book by Goldin and Katz The Race Between Education and Technology, in which the authors claim that our economy is struggling and inequality rising because we’ve hit a plateau on college-graduation rates. The authors, professors at Princeton, don’t see that there’s a good reason for the plateau: We’re already luring into college just about all those who can benefit from advanced studies and huge numbers who can’t. They probably think that the typical student is similar to the ones they’re familar with. Sadly, most are not. Most are academically weak and disengaged kids who just want a few years of college fun with little work to interfere with that. Moreover, it just isn’t true that more and more of the jobs available require high-level academic preparation.

Toward the end of the essay, we get to the nonsense. “As the world indulged in a bubble of false prosperity and excessive materialism, should universities — in their research, teaching and writing — have made greater efforts to expose the patterns of risk and denial?” That sounds just the Party Line on the economic meltdown: It just happened as a result of too much unfettered capitalism. This will no doubt come as a shock to Ms. Faust, but there were academics who tried to explain to anyone who’d listen that government policy was causing an unsustainable (to use the new buzzword in higher ed) expansion of the housing industry and that when the bubble burst, there would be severe economic damage. If someone on Harvard’s faculty had written an article or given a speech in 2007 blasting the Fed’s loose money policy and the Community Reinvestment Act for subverting mortgage lending standards, would she have enthusiastically supported it? Come on.

Rather than acting as a “counterweight to economic irresponsibility,” most of the academic community has been fully in support of the numerous statist interventions that have brought us to our woeful condition. The few professors who have criticized the government’s irresponsible policies have generally been ignored. But in any case, it isn’t the role of the university to act as the guiding star for society. It should endeavor to teach and discover knowledge; its job does not include solving our social and economic problems.