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<p>That assumes that you really need fully fledged math faculty to teach those feeders. Yet let’s be honest, those feeder courses (Math 16AB/1AB/54/53/55) aren’t exactly ground-breaking. Few if any cutting-edge concepts are being taught in those courses. They’re simple utilities and tools courses, where you’re taught how to compute derivatives, integrals, matrices, and simple differential equations, which befits the audience of engineering and natural science students who generally care very little for groundbreaking theory. They just need to know enough of the math to use as a toolkit with which to pass the courses in their major. </p>
<p>I’ll inject a personal anecdote of mine. I remember sitting in one of the feeder math courses and wishing it was taught by my old high school math teacher instead. Sure, he wasn’t an eminent mathematics research scholar who was heavily published in the top journals, but at least he knew how to teach math in a way that made it fun and interesting in a way that the assigned mathematics professor could not. Nor, like I said, was the material groundbreaking stuff. If my old high school math teacher could successfully teach AP calculus, then certainly he could teach multivariable calculus and linear algebra. What that also means is that Berkeley could pick up some cheap lecturers who may not have the research portfolio to merit a tenure-track job, but who had strong teaching skills, to teach those feeders. You don’t need tenure-track faculty to teach feeder courses.</p>