Academic Tenure Priorities

The reason isn't tenure. The reason is that research universities value research much more highly than teaching. This is evident in faculty hiring practices, even the hiring of junior professors who don't yet have tenure. And this is also why underpaid graduate students and non-tenure-track postdocs are doing a lot of the teaching work at universities.

Yes, that is the standard bargain for tenure-track professors at U.S. research universities. You pay a little bit of teaching time (0-2 courses a semester) and get an abundance of research time. Tenure decisions are mostly based on research success. Teaching plays almost no role. Essentially, you're on a six-year clock to get X number of top journal publications. That provides a massive incentive for professors to focus almost exclusively on research over teaching.PhD students face simil

Im surprised the author does not mention tenure. I went to two uni's, one research based and one not. Once the professors hit tenure, the research professors mostly abdicated their teaching responsibilities, whereas the non-research just kept on teaching. I suspect once the author becomes tenured, and thus essentially immune to being fired or laid off, their tone will change.

It's not that they're not paid to care, it's that they're not paid to teach. At least at research universities, tenured/tenure-track faculty's job is to do produce research and get grants. Teaching is a thing that's piled on top of it that doesn't help your career and takes a whole lot of time away from your primary job function.A lot of professors do actually care about teaching and genuinely want to help students, but the system as designed strongly d

All of what you said is true, but the meaning of tenure is that you are paid a salary by the university and get to keep your job. That's a very generous protection and it's offered to encourage free discussion and exchange of ideas, which is what the University is all about. There are professors who choose to ditch research and make teaching their calling, even at research universities.Universities are not very well-run when compared to your average fortune 500 corporation, and ther

I think the problem is not being solved by the existence of tenure. It's masking the problem.Shouldn't everyone be hired with the intention that they do research in their field?It's not like universities don't have the money to have you teach 4 classes a semester and give you teacher assistants.The profit margins have room for expenses like this.I think my big issue is that I'm on the brunt of what happens when tenure gets to run wild.I'd also love it

This is sadly too common if you are not tenured, let alone not a Phd already. Universities treat their non revenue teachers as cattle. And there are darn few professors who bring in money.

Not really on-point, but there's frequent discussion about the the direction and value of higher education on HN, including questions of tenure. It would be interesting to hear more from someone who actually has academic tenure about the overhead you describe and how it has affected teaching and research, compared to your expectations when you began teaching.Good luck with making your decision. One-way choices like that are quite intimidating. A sanity check might be to consider what you woul

Lots of professors leave academia to pursue other careers. It frequently happens when they're denied tenure, which has nothing to do with misconduct (there are a lot of junior faculty competing for a small number of tenure slots). In a field like CS, professors can get much higher salaries working outside of academia, so many are tempted to leave.

If she's a prof, then she's engaging in the scam that is the current university system. Is she or the other profs you know advocating for the abolition of undergraduate degrees to be replaced by online learning like coursera or udacity. Also, abolishing phds/tenure and replacing with funding their research from kickstarter/indiegogo. Probably not. They might care about their few chosen students (selfishly, for the social company and labor it provides) but they're putting their finger up at the e