“I have related many times how one of the best-known professors in the department, having taught a 10-person seminar for fourth-year majors fall quarter, kept the seminar going through winter quarter on a voluntary, no-credit basis. (Something that not only deepened my son’s understanding of his field, but also deepened his friendship with one of the other students in the class, with whom he is now married.) Anyone who wanted could get involved in faculty research. My daughter’s department – one of the highest ranked in the university – just wasn’t like that.”
A year or two ago I spoke to an academic and asked why some departments were very “undergrad” friendly and others “not so much” (keeping in mind that this is a comparison among other elite private uni’s that all tend to be more friendly to undergrads than State U). This individual thought that it had to do with popularity of major relative to number of faculty in the department.
I posted before that my daughter gets far more attention from full-time faculty in the history department than she would in the Econ. department. While this isn’t always true, Econ. departments tend to have fewer, higher-paid faculty than history departments (last time I counted, UChicago’s History department had 50% more full-time faculty than it’s Economics department). They also have WAY more majors! (UChicago at over 1,100 last spring vs. History with under 200).
Faculty at research universities have responsibilities for research (of course), grad courses, and graduate student advising. These responsibilities will vary among members of the same department, and also among departments (as some humanities and even a social science or two might have markedly fewer grad students than other departments). So one major might either see lots of full-time faculty available to divide up these other responsibilities, or it might have some full time faculty willing to cut back on research or a thriving grad program, in order to focus more on the undergraduates via teaching and mentoring, etc.
The situation is very different at an LAC, where full-time faculty are particularly devoted to teaching, mentoring and advising grad students. There are no PhD students on campus to mess that up. This is probably why LAC’s can be great PhD feeder schools.
Some full-time faculty members at the research uni’s clearly enjoy teaching and interacting with undergraduates. Furthermore, you don’t need a Nobel Laureate or even a tenured member to inspire you in a particular discipline - all you need is a great teacher, and that can be a lecturer or grad student as much as a tenured faculty member.