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Comment by solveforall | Hacker News Reader

If what he Dr. Coward says is true, and I have no reason to doubt him, this makes me sad as a Berkeley alum. I remember taking Math 53 with an awful professor who could barely speak English and refused to cover the material, asking us to just read the material ourselves and ask him questions. This professor had been there for many years despite repeatedly getting in trouble for failing too many students (that he neglected to teach). This is unfortunately the state of universities now, teaching is nothing, research is everything. Lecturers are treated like crap and barely scraping by. I wonder when the devaluation of teaching will catch up to us; maybe another country that values teachers will be able to attract more of the best students in the world.

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I wish I knew some good fix to split up research and lecturing. The teaching should be done by people who are good at it and the research by people who are good at that. I suppose there might be some areas where there are just too few people qualified to teach something at the proper level, but I somehow doubt that's true at the undergraduate level.

I remember distinctly which professors of mine were effective at conveying the material and an understanding of it vs. those who were not.

The National Science Foundation (or other group) should produce high-quality video lectures for all courses.

If this caught on all mathematics departments would lose funding and no longer be able to fund research. It's a strange conflict of interests.

I would hope there would be funding from somewhere, at least at the state/federal level. Mathematical research has proven very important to a number of advances in the sciences, even research that was once thought to have no practical use.

I think a pretty overwhelming majority of math research funding comes from the fact that math departments are service departments for engineering, physics, etc.

The NSF spends a total of just under 250 million per year on math research. The DoD and DoE also have around 100 million each. Some mathematicians estimate [1] about 30k mathematicians in the US, which at a conservative salary of 50k per year (!) is already 1.5 billion.

In other words, either gov't agencies would have to roughly triple their funding (just for math), or about a third of mathematicians would lose their jobs. These are, of course, very rough estimates.

[1]: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/5485/how-many-mathematicia...

I think you meant two thirds would lose their jobs :)

And yes, I don't know where the funding would come from if math education was commoditized, as perhaps it should be.

> teaching is nothing, research is everything

Teaching is nothing, research is nothing; grants, tuition, and donations are everything.

I don't know what's sadder, how far universities have fallen, or the fact that there's no sign that these trends are slowing.

I stand corrected :)

Professors are never required to have a single teaching class. They themselves are not taught how to actually teach students. This is why so many professors are just smart but can't teach to save their lives.

They are ill prepared by their degree and can have huge communication or social issues that stand between them and their students.

Administrators usually push to give good grades for colleges with open enrollment. So the classes are easy and the test are easy. Make me sad and is part fo the reason I left working at a University.

I wonder if we had the same guy, Russian, with his own formalism and his own textbook published online? I remember thinking it may well have had merit but since most of us in there were applying the subject matter in our respective fields which stuck to the traditional formalism. .. it was a challenge.

I think it was a special form of multi variable, forget what he called it. Lecture was in mining. Honestly I went to lecture too rarely to give fair judgement

Perelman? He's brilliant, but certainly put off a lot of engineering and other students who were just there to fill recs and expected to be handheld through the course.

No, the prof I was referring to was Chinese. It's pretty hard to identify that one prof who can't speak English and can't teach, when there are so many to choose from.

That said, I've also had great profs at Berkeley as well, though I suspect they do it out of the love of their profession the subject matter, rather than career advancement.

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