<p>Colleges and universities are almost always an assemblage of numerous departments, each requiring considerable overhead expenses, and often squabbling among themselves for money and prestige.</p>
<p>Sometimes, but not always. And yes, this makes sense for a college that has 475 students, one major and a handful of faculty. My university has nearly 4,000 full-time faculty members. They need to have separate administrative units - how are the English faculty going to decide what’s appropriate teaching and research methods for the ecology faculty, and vice versa?</p>
<p>Moreover, their published research often has nothing to do with knowledge that is useful in the teaching of undergraduates.</p>
<p>This is absurd. I’m not even a full faculty member - I’m a graduate student who has taught and TAed classes - and I have found that my research is reciprocal with my teaching. When I teach lectures about public health, I don’t just teach what I’ve read in books, I can teach the things I have actually discovered and have experience with or things I have discussed with colleagues. When my students ask me questions that touch the edge of knowledge in my field, I can offer educated speculation based on my own knowledge of what my lab and others are doing to advance the field. And I’ve watched the big researchers in my department teach - they use their own research, and the research of their colleagues and advisors, very prominently in their work.</p>
<p>Even when I’m teaching something like basic introductory statistics, I use my research experience. To my students then it’s not just abstract facts/equations that they are learning but I teach them how these techniques are applied in the real world, both in basic science and in applied settings.</p>
<p>Most universities have post-tenure review. The idea that tenured faculty just “coast” is a myth; studies have been done that show that tenured faculty are often more productive than their untenured counterparts. In addition to doing more research, they are also expected to serve on more administrative committees and do more work within their fields (heading associations, organizing symposia or entire conferences, serving as expert witnesses, etc.)</p>
<p>Also, the author assumes that the high attrition rate is due to “too much work and too little fun for quite a few.” I’m imagining that it has more to do with the fact that UMR is a branch campus, and many students may have started there with the intention to transfer to UMN’s main campus - or that it’s new and new organizations almost always have some kinks to work out.</p>
<p>A younger college classmate who served as a student rep on one such committee wrote in a college publication how they eliminated a few prospective Professors right away because it came through in the interview and sample classes that they had little/no interest in teaching undergrads. Was a bit puzzling as if that’s the case, why would they bother applying to a college where teaching undergrads is clearly prioritized???</p>
<p>Because academic positions are scarce, and some people are willing to teach anywhere just to be a professor. Their first aim may be a research institution, but those jobs are extremely competitive and limited. The vast majority of higher education institutions are teaching-oriented, so if a person really wants to be a professor, they’d do well to apply to those places too. Although it does baffle me why a person would want to be a professor SO BADLY if they don’t like teaching, since only a relative handful of professors work at places where they teach fewer than three classes a semester - and even then, at my top RU/VH university, the professors teach two classes a semester!</p>