> writing software is a low status academic activity
This is just not true. People like: Stallman, Knuth, Ritchie, Kernighan, Norvig or Torvalds are not considered as people of low status in the academic world.
Writing horrible spaghetti code in academia may be considered "low status"; but that's another story.
He should compare apples to apples. I.e. do people who work in academia write better or worse code there; compared to when they work for a business? I.e. they should be compared to themselves in different situations, not to some imaginary high coding standard that I've never seen anywhere.
In my own experience from academia at least I'd say that the lack of deadlines; the possibility to do whatever I want, plus the lack of management, creates much higher quality software in academia. When you work commercially, you will churn out embarrassing stuff just to make some stuff work before a deadline.