<p>From JHS:
“…I would suggest that elite research universities, at least, do NOT exist for the benefit of students … Undergraduate students are customers, and get catered to somewhat, but the primary goal of the institution is to support and to amuse the faculty.”</p>
<p>While I agree with the overall sentiment, I haven’t seen too many faculty members, especially junior faculty, at major research universities who felt “amused.” The job of such faculty is to bring grant money, with the attendant overhead charges, into the university. Prior to obtaining tenure, and usually afterwards, the life of such a faculty member (in the sciences at least) is a gerbil wheel of:</p>
<p>1) Use your start-up funds to get computers, lab equipment, graduate students and postdocs. Get them started doing research while you write numerous grant proposals.
2) Hopefully one of your proposals is funded. Use it to hire more graduate students and postdocs to do research.
3) Use the results of that research to support more grant proposals. Go back to step 2 and repeat until you get tenure, burn out, retire, or die.</p>
<p>Where are the undergraduates in all of this? In the hard sciences, they’re pretty much in the background. They aren’t as productive as graduate students or postdocs in terms of research, and so they don’t figure as prominently. As for teaching, well, as a faculty member at a research university, your teaching ability doesn’t factor into your promotion or tenure decisions. So you really have no motivation to spend much time on it, and a lot of motivation not to.</p>