(1) The shortest response is simply to note that Brad DeLong's glosses on what I actually said are straightforward misapplications of the law of the excluded middle. To argue against budgets being "determined by" student enrollments is not to say that they must be "independent of" those enrollments. To say that student surveys are a counterproductive measure of faculty teaching is not to say that "student perceptions of professor quality should be irrelevant for promotion and retention decisions".
(2) When budgets depend on student numbers, departments react, quite rationally, by pushing to include as many of their courses as possible into the "required" column. Logrolling causes this to expand to fill an ever-increasing portion of students' lives. At my school, electives are down to less than one-third of total courses, and my student advising is largely taken up by interpreting the byzantine rules that tell a student what she has to take. There's precious little time to find out what she wants to take.
(3) Anyone minimally acquainted with survey research expects surveys to be tested for reliability and validity. Student evaluations almost never are. The earliest inquiries into validity of student measurements correlated student evaluations with grades in mutli-section classes that administered a common final exam. The correlation was (a) slight and (b) negative. The piece of research done using evaluations at my institution finds a robust correlation between student evaluations and expected grade. In brief, these evaluations don't reliably measure what we intend them to measure and reliably measure something else.
(4) As to the argument that "these claims make sense only if students are a swinish multitude, incapable of any judgment at all about their own interests and intellectual development": Anyone familiar with Howard Becker's old work on the grade-driven students of the University of Kansas in the late 1950s should have recognized the spirit in which I offered my remarks. Universities help create the students we piss and moan about. They teach them, very effectively, to regard education as a commodity, at the pursuit of a credential divorced from their non-monetary concerns. Predictably, students then try to procure this commodity at the lowest possible cost. At both individual and departmental levels, faculty members are given incentives to cater to this desire for education lite.
(5) A few years ago, I started conducting surveys in which I asked my students how much time they spent on their studies per week, exclusive of attending class. The medians in my first-year general education classes ran from 6-8 hours per week for all classes (with a standard full load being four courses per term). My brother, who teaches in the University of Missouri system, tells me that the state conducts similar surveys systematically and found that the only campus where students spend more than ten hours per week on their studies were the students at the University of Missouri-Rolla, a campus top-heavy with engineering students. Outside the handful of schools that get to cherry-pick their students, this depressingly low level of commitment seems to be the norm.
(6) The cynics around here who really do despise their students as part of a swinish multitude are the ones who long ago got with the program. They offer basket-weaving courses that demand nothing of them or of their students and live easy lives. After offering something that you think - or thought - precious to students, only to find it despised year after year, it's not an unreasonable adjustment. The other alternative is to constantly swim upstream in an effort to decommoditize education, seduce your students into wanting what no one ever told them was worth wanting, spend endless hours on indifferent prose trying to get them to see that language can be a thing of beauty, and on, and on, and on. Unless you can (a) see your frustrations as stemming from systemic causes not those damned kids and (b) find colleagues who will help keep you from throwing up your hands in despair, you won't last on this path.
Michael McIntyre