Do these guys ever talk about how they love teaching? The primary purpose of universities is ostensibly teaching, yet these people are all about other things. That's fine, but perhaps they really are working in the wrong place.
For example, a PhD prepares you for a life of research, not one of teaching. At my institution, advisors strongly prefer their PhD students are RAs and not TAs (research assistants who do no teaching, vs teaching assistants who might be responsible for an entire class).
If you look at a professor's job description, it's often 16 hours teaching duties per week, with the rest for research. Most professors I know rarely work less than 60 hours a week, so the majority of that time is on research related work.
Perhaps I'm old-school, but IMHO (as someone with a PhD), the obligation to teach comes with the advanced degree/advanced knowledge. You were trained to know more about this subject than most other people in the world, therefore part of your job (whether paid or not) is to teach others in some way.
Universities should be bifurcated into research organizations and public education organizations. Research organizations should still teach, but to an audience of trainee researchers. Public education organizations can focus their time teaching the majority of students using polished pedagogical skills and collating key results from research organizations into more accessible formats.
So you're saying the purpose of getting a PhD is to be an eternal post-doc, or work in a national lab?
Because the moment you become a faculty, you stop doing exactly what you were trained for.
Step 0 in getting a tenure-track position at an R1 research school is to have an excellent research track record.
Step 1 is having a plan that is likely to yield at least a decade of reliable research success and grant funding.
A strong desire to teach undergraduates is somewhere between Step 3 and Step 10, depending upon the school.
There are a number of reasons why I haven't pursued a faculty position. Among them is that I love working closely with graduate students, but am not fired up about teaching large classes of undergraduates. Another is that doing a reasonable job of research and running a research group is already more than a full-time job. To layer teaching on top is, for me, a guaranteed path to burnout and sadness. So, I've ridden the research/postdoc train about as far as it will go -- I'm leaving my postdoc position in mid/late summer.
Isnt that what I said? People like you (nothing wrong with that, we need you too) are in the wrong place if the go into teaching.
That's indeed unfortunate. Maybe the two should not be as tightly coupled as they are.
That being said, even if James loved teaching, that wouldn't really change his thesis in the least.
I'm not sure this is true - at these people's level the focus is 99% on research.