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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

Complaining that professors spend too much time doing research and not enough time teaching is like complaining that basketballers spend too much time playing basketball and not enough time making advertisements for shoes.

Research is what professors want to be doing (at least in the sciences -- I understand it's a bit of a joke in the humanities). Teaching is what they're obliged to do. If you want to get some of the smartest people in the world and pay them a barely-six-figure salary to teach the same damn introductory-level BS to spotty-faced teens every damn year, you'd better be offering some damn good perks, and the number one perk is to be allowed to spend most of your time researching whatever you're interested in.

If you want to be taught by professors who aren't at the top of their fields, you can go to a community college, but your questions will be rubbing up against the edge of their knowledge pretty damn quick.

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You're presenting a false dichotomy, and nobody with who thinks of students as "spotty-faced teens" should be allowed within miles of a college faculty position.

Andrew Hacker himself (one of the co-authors of the book under discussion) is a good counter-example. He was a longtime professor at a public college (Queens College). (Full disclosure: I was a student at QC from 1986-1992. I never took a full class with Professor Hacker, but I heard him lecture a few times.) His classes always filled up quickly despite their reputation as challenging, he won numerous teaching awards and he was near-universally regarded as an inspiring lecturer. Nevertheless, he was also a respected scholar who regularly published articles and books that nobody in his field could ignore. It doesn't have to be either/or.

Another example would be Richard Feynman who was apparently a great teacher. He turned down an opportunity to work at the IAS because it didn't include teaching. He also won a Nobel Prize so he wasn't too bad as a researcher either.

Great. Now find enough people like him to teach every single class.

Obviously brilliant researchers who happen to also love to teach (and are good at it) are the ideal professors that every university should want, but merely wanting people good at all parts of being a professor does not make them exist in large quantities.

With today's technology there are enough technologies to scale a great teacher. youtube(especially with it's minute by minute engagment measurement), stackoverflow (for questions and answers), and others.

And you can see this happening, slowly.

I have to call bullshit. The best professors I had loved to teach, they couldn't be stopped from doing it.

In particular I remember one who, when teaching us a brilliant technique, behaved exactly like a kid on Christmas morning. His enthusiasm made us all remember that class.

What's your definition of "best"? The ones you liked the best? Or the ones who did the best research?

It would not surprise me if the professors you liked the best were the same ones that enjoyed teaching. However, tenure and such are much harder to come by for doing good teaching than for doing good research.

Maybe the "best" were the ones that taught him the most? Yes, teaching is not valued by the people who are hiring professors. That is precisely the issue raised by the original article.

Unless you think that best research is the same as number of things published, we won't know how good it is decades from now so I will have to stick with smart as a measurement of how good it is.

I would have to say that that guy was smart and knew his stuff.

I'm not sure why you think we need researchers who are at the top of their fields to "teach the same damn introductory-level BS to spotty-faced teens every damn year".

> I understand it's a bit of a joke in the humanities

Huh? Do you have any first hand insight?

Mostly from reading the forums on the Chronicle of Higher Education. Full of assistant professors in the humanities complaining about how they have to do this "research" BS, whereas if you hang out with assistant professors in the sciences they'll complain about their onerous one-course-per-semester teaching load.

It's completely the opposite in my experience. Though I've only worked in the European and Australian systems, not the US.

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