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The counterpoint to that is that universities are moving more and more teaching positions to short term contracts with terrible pay and benefits. So skilled people might instead choose to go in the industry/pursue other opportunities, and the students find themselves with instructors who end doing what they do because they can't go anywhere else.

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I find that the people that are best at research (and thus most likely to get tenure) are usually very poor teachers.

Usually they are so good at their subject that they tend to skip steps in their explanations and forget how difficult a certain concept is and expect everyone to breeze through it.

Unfortunately, universities optimize for research rather than teaching.

And that's ok. If the Professorships have value to anyone they'll get paid. If some positions are being removed then maybe they just weren't that useful.

That ignores a huge amount of evidence that we routinely shoot ourselves in the foot by making flawed assessments of the relative benefits of short vs. long-term rewards.

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