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Comment by goldemerald | Hacker News Reader

I don't think a university's primary purpose is teaching; I believe it's for research.

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.

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It depends on the university and the department, something that is lost on a lot of undergrads picking a school.

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.

That depends on who you assign the professor to teach. If they're teaching and training new PhDs and researchers that need to know the latest knowledge in the field, then that's a reasonable use of the professor's research time. It could be this professor is one of dozens of people around the world actually qualified to teach and interpret the results of ongoing research. If they're being assigned to teach undergrads Chem 101 than that's a waste of valuable time.

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.

I've often wondered if professors of a field (or PhD holders) are uniquely the least qualified to teach their area of expertise. A person who both cares enough about a topic and has an intuition such that they can understand their field, cannot convey their understanding of the material to students without the same care/intuition.

> ... PhD prepares you for a life of research ...

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.

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