The author of the article feels like he is the victim of resentment at the hands of his students (references to "intellectual valet" and so forth). I don't think students are necessarily in the wrong -- most are probably in college to get a job, and they're right to resent the stranglehold that universities have on social prestige and career respectability. They end up taking it out on the professors, because, well, they're stuck in class listening to The Expert for hours a day because of this or that degree requirement.
I think the fact that American students have to pay a lot of money to be somewhere they don't really want to be exacerbates this. Plus, it produces a sort of customer mentality, where you're paying for service and "the customer is always right". Things aren't perfect here either, but Danish university students tend not to have the same weird adversarial relationship with higher education. I would guess the fact that they don't pay anything, but in fact get paid to attend, helps a bit. In a sense they're employees rather than customers (albeit at a junior apprenticeship level of employment), and the state, which wants an educated populace, is the customer.