At what point of this does he comment on the quality of his ability to teach students and lead them to become incredibly successful? This sounds more of a professional researcher than a professor.
1. Advising is teaching. In fact, advising is the majority component of an R1 teaching load! So, he DID discuss the teaching component of his job. A lot.
2. In terms of classroom teaching, he was probably teaching 1-2 courses per year at Harvard. So classroom teaching really wasn't the majority component of his job. It's unsurprising that he didn't spend much time talking about this minority component of his job, in the same way that it's unsurprising when a developer talks primarily about writing/reading/testing code rather than the ~20% of their workday activities that are something other than writing/reading/testing code.
Of course, one hopes that developers introspect on their effectiveness in various meetings, when talking to clients or internal stakeholders, and so on. But you'd be unsurprised if a dev, discussing their biggest mistakes during their first few years, focus on code-related mistakes.
3. Maybe he felt good about his non-advising, classroom teaching? The title of the post is "everything I did wrong", not "a summary of everything I did".
It's the title of the job: Professor.
Also, you've completely ignored my first point above. Even if we accept that teaching is the primary responsibility of a "Professor", it does not follow that this teaching manifests primarily as classroom teaching. Advising is teaching, and is the primary form of teaching undertaken by professors at certain research-intensive universities.
Incidentally, there are job titles that describe classroom teachers at research universities -- "instructor" or "teaching professor". The author of this post was not an "instructor" or a "teaching professor". He was an assistant and then associate professor. Classroom teaching was not a majority component of his job.
Luckily for every software engineer out there, historical cruft in the names of job titles is a bad criteria for evaluating job performance.
>> It's the title of the job: Engineer.
From the dictionary: "Engineer: a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines"
Hopefully you see the point I'm making? Just because you think a job title means something, and just because that's an accurate historical meaning, doesn't mean that the job title retains the same meaning today.
Yes, that was my point. Your argument -- that a professor should be expected teach in classrooms a lot because they're called a professor -- is absurd :-)
I would venture that most people equate professor with teaching. While many of the people that responded to monksy, understand that the position is much more than that. Seeing this dichotomy is important to having a productive discussion.
This happens a lot in life. Another example from higher education—University President. Most people equate University President with something along the lines of U.S. President and hold the requisite expectations for them. Reality = fundraising figurehead.
There should be a title of Graduate Advisor, and Teaching Professor (those who teach others to become a professor/teach in a classroom). There should be specialization on being an effective teacher. There should be pathways to success. Pushing all students into research and half heartedly force them to learn how to teach only re-enforces this idea.
For those "graduate professors" who just consider advising and mentoring grad students teaching, you have to apply that same logic that by mentoring anyone in the field, you're now a teacher. (That's a dualism)
My big issue here: we're completely ignoring the issue that a student comes into the university to learn. (Even if it's a research institution) By assigning "professors" that don't actually teach you're doing a huge disservice to everyone. In those cases students are left to their own devices, they're not going to do well for research, community, or industry. Really what's happening is people are paying for an apprentiship to become a researcher.
This is already a job title! An alternative, often equivalent title is "Instructor". And these people are primarily responsible for classroom teaching! And they are primarily evaluated upon that teaching! What you are asking for already exists.
There are also colleges and universities where all people with the title "professor" are dedicated to classroom teaching. Harvard isn't one of them.
> There should be a title of Graduate Advisor
There is. For historical reasons, at Harvard, the "Graduate Advisor" is called an "assistant/associate/full professor". But don't get confused by the name. These professors don't do much classroom teaching, just like most software engineers don't build engines. It's just a title, not a job description, and getting angry about it is just as silly as getting angry that most software engineers don't write software for engine control units!
> we're completely ignoring the issue that a student comes into the university to learn
And assisting in that learning is not the majority component of the jobs of tenure-track professors at research institutions.
> Really what's happening is people are paying for an apprenticeship to become a researcher.
Research grants, not undergraduate tuition, pay for tenure-track professors' research at places like Harvard.
You seem to have a deeply flawed understanding about what a modern research university is, how it operates, and what undergraduate tuition money is spent on. That's perfectly fine, except that you're continually arguing with people who try to explain to you your misconceptions.
Most students come to university to be credentialed, and the higher prestige the institution the better - student demand seems to show they would rather listen to the ramble of a famous professor who can't wait to get back to the lab, than an effective dedicated teacher.
Most of the professors I know who are also good teachers are using those classes as the top of their recruiting funnel for one thing or another.
As mentioned elsewhere, advising is often more important and usually takes up much more time.
The current setup where a professor can delagate teaching to TAs, and overwork/underpay assistents/juniors is ethically wrong, often illegal in work practices (payment below min wage), and fraudulent to the students paying tutition.
Teaching is why people get professorships at teaching universities, where the main part of your job is to teach (typically 6-8 courses per year).
If you are getting a job at a research-oriented university, you typically teach 1-3 courses per year, and the focus of your activity is on running a world-class research program (doing research, training PhD students, and raising money to pay those students / buy equipment, etc.). Teaching is still important and takes time, but you have a lot of other responsibilities. There are an enormous amount of pulls on a professor's time, though, and most work very long hours (my colleagues and I probably work 60-80 hours per week and we aren't at Harvard).
I don't think it is appropriate to delegate teaching to TAs (I delegate much grading and help with homework assignments). Regarding pay for research assistants, there simply isn't a way to change this in the US. There just isn't enough government funding. To pay a single PhD student a stipend of around $30K per year for 20 hours of work per week* costs a budget around $60-80K with overhead and other factors per year. Many US agencies (e.g., NSF) only fund around $100-150K per year if you win a grant (7% success rate for many of them), so you can only fund 1-2 PhD students with that and you fought really hard to get that award to pay your students (lots of rejections). Most universities also won't let you pay them higher salaries, even if you want to as a professor.
I used to complain about these things as a graduate student, but once you get the job (and have made a ton of budgets) you see the world differently. I'd love to change things, but don't blame the professors for things way out of their control.
* 20 hours of work per week that's not related to their thesis, etc. Most of the time we are trying to get students funded on projects where that 20 hours of work does apply to their thesis, so that they get more out of it. They of course must work much more than 20 hours per week on their thesis project(s) to do cutting-edge work and graduate on time.
> Teaching is the reason why professors are there.
This is a commonly held belief by non-academics. It is not one held by academics at R1 schools.
Note that there are many lower level universities (not R1) at which the teaching is sometimes quite good. There are also very real things called "teaching colleges". If someone wants to go to a place with great teachers, they largely should not go to an R1 school.
> If you can't/don't want to teach you should be a professional researcher and admit that.
Being a professor at an R1 school is basically making the claim that you are a researcher -- one who happens to teach from time to time.
> That is what the tax payers support when supporting universities. (Via tutiion, etc.. [grants are not considered in this])
Are you sure about that?
This is a potentially huge discussion, but "teaching" is not high on the list of added value if you attend an R1 school. In fact, the instruction is often terrible. The idea is that you will be given access to resources, and smart, motivated people know how to avail themselves of useful resources.
Taxpayers get research labs that spawn new industries, develop mature industries, and contribute to high value-add labor markets (great for local economy).
Students get access to bleeding edge research, researchers, and tools.
Much tuition these days goes towards facilities that the people who can pay want (e.g., nicer dorms, gyms, etc.). Note that many of the top student scholars at R1 schools pay little or no tuition.
One could also argue that people pay tuition for access to certain social circles -- social capital is a real thing with real value at a wide range of R1 schools.
I could go on, but the value derived from how tuition and taxpayer money is used is a deep and complex topic.
> The current setup where a professor can delegate teaching to TAs, and overwork/underpay assistents/juniors is ethically wrong, often illegal in work practices (payment below min wage), and fraudulent to the students paying tuition.
The delegation part is fine -- the content of the classes that have TAs is not terribly challenging or interesting to a professional in the field, so delegating it (especially for large classes) is an intelligent allocation of human resources.
That said, the illegal parts you mentioned are terrible and should not happen. To be fair, the only cases I've directly seen of overly worked TA/RA labor was when the grad student was doing something wrong (e.g., grading with heuristics that were overly granular). That said, I have read stories, and I believe that they are true at least in part if not in whole.
Repeating this line over and over does not make it so. (Tenure-track CS) professors at Harvard are not there to (primarily) teach (undergraduate) courses. This is just a fact.
> If you can't/don't want to teach you should be a professional researcher and admit that
Professional researchers do not typically advise doctoral students. So professors at research universities are doing a lot of teaching that someone at an industry lab probably would not be doing.
Classroom teaching is not the only form of teaching, and professional researchers do not grow on trees.
> Via tuition, etc... fraudulent to the students paying tutition
Tenure-track professors at places like Harvard fund themselves through grants, not undergraduate tuition dollars.