Is this an unreasonable professor

QuantMech
Sat, 25 Sep 2010 01:17:32 +0000

I think LostCoast is right: At major research universities, in the sciences, faculty members generally have more time and effort to invest in teaching after they have tenure, rather than before. Unless a person is doing a really poor job of teaching–in all honesty–the quality of teaching will very rarely figure into a tenure or promotion decision, at such a university.

The “gerbil-wheel” aspect doesn’t really end once a faculty member is tenured. A significant problem is that the Ph.D. completion time-scale is longer than the typical grant cycle (with some exceptions). So a faculty member has to take on students, with no pre-set guarantee that he/she can continue to support them as research assistants, a few years down the road.