What's the point of all this writing?

I just read a couple of interesting posts responding to this article by Mark Bauerlein in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The thrust of the article is that college professors work too hard on things that don't really matter:

But Professor Kelly-Woessner maintains, "Our average workweek is 60+ hours. And unlike a regular job, where you come home at 5, we’re grading well into the evening."

Can this be true, 60+ hours?

Maybe for some segments, such as teachers with a 4-4 load that includes heavy writing assignments on the syllabus. And maybe for assistant professors struggling to get the book finished before tenure time, or researchers in the sciences working on a timetable because of funding.

But if we look at tenured professors in the humanities and in many other disciplines, it seems to me that much of the work they do is entirely self-generated. The conference papers that have to be written, the scholarly articles they want to complete, the book projects that hang over them . . . these are not required. They are elective. Yes, they can enhance a career, extend a CV, or even contribute to the historical record—sometimes. But the fact is that the degree to which the vast majority of conference papers and articles in the humanities effectively change the working conditions of professors doesn’t come close to justifying the number of hours they spend on the projects.

This pricked my ears up, for two reasons. One is that I start my job as a college lecturer in August. The second reason is that I'm actually writing one of those kinds of papers right now, to the detriment of my dissertation schedule. It's about an experiment I helped develop for junior and senior level college students. I can pretty safely say that this paper won't change my short-term job prospects (my future employer doesn't even know about it), and it won't make my CV look that much better. I'm doing it because I think it's interesting and because I think college professors teaching similar classes might want to use it. Is it self-generated work? Sure. I could pawn it off onto someone else quite easily. But I'm not going to, because I think it's worth doing and worth doing right.

Apparently such things - pride in one's work and an interest in one's field - aren't a big part of what Bauerlein thinks academia should be about. That's pretty strange for someone who holds a faculty position at a university, don't you think?