The job description of "professor" is certainly a strange beast: teacher/scientist. It makes about as much sense as actor/programmer.
The perverse incentives this creates are massive. Universities hire scientists rather than teachers in order to get their hands on half the scientist's grants [1]. Scientists waste their time masquerading as teachers because they can't get grants if they don't work for a university [2]. This is harmful both to science (I'm not doing research in class) and students. Of course, they don't put much effort into teaching because they are judged on their ability to get grants. Actual teachers are squeezed out, since there is no room for them.
My proposed solution? Completely decouple research and teaching. The NSF can subsidize science, the DOE can subsidize universities, and teaching institutions will no longer have an incentive to hire scientists as teachers.
[1] If a scientist gets a grant, the university will take about half as "overhead".
[2] Not strictly true, due to a few national labs, but close enough.
At some point though, you definitely want the teachers to be experts. This may not be true for most undergraduate curricula, true, but are not most undergraduate courses already taught by graduate students, lecturers and adjunct faculty? At the graduate level, you really want people who are active participants in their fields-- and this is probably true for the arts as well as the sciences.
I guess what i am saying is this: if all research moves to national labs and private institutes you will discover graduate education migrating there as well.
Teaching colleges do exist that have no research expectations of their faculty, but high teaching expectations. Although, the fact that the name "teaching colleges" exists at all says something.
But everything else you said: pretty much, yeah. Once, I was in a meet-and-greet between grad students an interviewing faculty candidate when it dawned on me that as a second year grad student, I had as much teaching experience as he did.
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The job description of "professor" is certainly a strange beast: teacher/scientist. It makes about as much sense as actor/programmer.
The perverse incentives this creates are massive. Universities hire scientists rather than teachers in order to get their hands on half the scientist's grants [1]. Scientists waste their time masquerading as teachers because they can't get grants if they don't work for a university [2]. This is harmful both to science (I'm not doing research in class) and students. Of course, they don't put much effort into teaching because they are judged on their ability to get grants. Actual teachers are squeezed out, since there is no room for them.
My proposed solution? Completely decouple research and teaching. The NSF can subsidize science, the DOE can subsidize universities, and teaching institutions will no longer have an incentive to hire scientists as teachers.
[1] If a scientist gets a grant, the university will take about half as "overhead".
[2] Not strictly true, due to a few national labs, but close enough.
At some point though, you definitely want the teachers to be experts. This may not be true for most undergraduate curricula, true, but are not most undergraduate courses already taught by graduate students, lecturers and adjunct faculty? At the graduate level, you really want people who are active participants in their fields-- and this is probably true for the arts as well as the sciences.
I guess what i am saying is this: if all research moves to national labs and private institutes you will discover graduate education migrating there as well.
Teaching colleges do exist that have no research expectations of their faculty, but high teaching expectations. Although, the fact that the name "teaching colleges" exists at all says something.
But everything else you said: pretty much, yeah. Once, I was in a meet-and-greet between grad students an interviewing faculty candidate when it dawned on me that as a second year grad student, I had as much teaching experience as he did.