As a tax payer, I am very concerned if the people I fund with my taxes to do a job unilaterally declare they are no longer going to do the half of it.
[1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research...
Nowadays, promotions of professors for different levels (Assistant, Associate, Professor) is solely dependent on number of papers they are publishing in Q1 journals. But the research maybe entirely bogus, same ideas repurposed hundreds of times by different professors.
The entire concept about "systematic knowledge" has gone downhill.
UK universities do currently hire people to do research and teach. And tenure is based on research not teaching. Teaching is seen as something that funds the operation to an extent. Some are excellent teachers. Some merely provide the material.
It works as is because researchers are not meaningfully impacted by having to do a few hours a week. And student get access to people in touch with the field. But it is not optimal having people who often are not good at teaching and/or don't particularly want to do it, taking lectures and tutorials.
But I do agree that the ability to produce and procure research is not at all coupled with the ability to teach.
In a similar vein, it is recommended that if you are in a business meeting you hear what the junior positions have to say about something first and work your way up the chain of command rather than the other way around due to the junior positions being less familiar with internal processes and thus more likely to flag or suggest something completely out of left field that the higher ups might miss.
Note, I'm saying all of this as someone outside of academia who is passionate about science and had a very mixed bag of teachers in undergrad.
Assuming we have time to do this in some post-having-jobs world, of course.
I think in some subjects (e.g. literature) the greater prestige of research leads to a lot of pointless research and we need more teaching.
Of course, there are many good researches who are bad teachers. I am not so sure about vice-versa, but, nonetheless good teaching should be rewarded more, as should the ability to communicate knowledge in other ways (e.g. by writing books).
I've worked with good and bad at both. Some of the most difficult problems when you have students who have had excellent teachers and then get dropped into the real world. If they don't learn themselves how to apply what they're learning (the other side of the coin of training) then they're often no better than an llm stuck in a loop, they know the textbook but don't know the gray areas...
Also professors and researchers are required to be able to communicate otherwise they're useless to the field. They need to better.
I'm not saying every lecturer will hold any interest in every lecture course. I've had the ones who are there lecturing core material to avoid the dept losing its accreditation and I've done electives where the professor is off the wall and spends half of the time going on about their research instead of the address material (fun but painful come exam time).
This is like saying peasants growing vegetables in the field should not mix with philosophers questioning the secrets of the Universe.
Problem is most research is just pissing in the wind. No real results. Show me the cure for cancer. Show me the warp engine.
So it's very nice to sit in their ivory tower doing ivory tower stuff while the peasants feed them with the vegetables they grow plowing the fields.
In reality, let them also teach. That's real, palpable work. I can't do all nice things and never touch shit work, so should professors because unless they cure cancer or invent the warp engine now, they are not a privileged cast.
On the other hand the course I learnt the most from was taught by a passionate lecturer who isn't even a professor, and he gets the highest ratings every year. (Yes we have a "rate my prof" event)
But this exists in many educational + research institutions already. Where it runs into problems is in resource constrained environments, where there aren't the budgets to support research-only positions that aren't 'less than' roles or the institution can't support the grant ambitions of highest 'performing' teaching researchers, stuck that they don't go to those institutions and more less research-focused (or at least smaller grant value) teachers populate those schools.
I'm trying not to make any value-judgements here, so please ignore and bias vibes that gives off.
If we split them up, then the teachers will only be able to teach what they have theoretically learned from literature only. What we need is for institutions to reward teaching, reward students who excel and most importantly, reward teachers who produce excellent students.
Disdain for teaching should not be the norm. After all, what are they doing if not teaching when they publish a paper, or give a talk at conferences? Might as well be a hermit scientist then.
So this article is really not saying anything controversial in the strictly ontological side of things, in fact it's already a relatively common stance to prefer supervising few (or, more rarely, none at all) students.
This researcher is saying "when I consider hiring someone as a workhorse, I might prefer AI instead"; what's the harm in that? Too many PhD students are used as disposable cheap labor, seeing little personal growth in their PhD journey and being generally neglected and abused.
The authors itself writes:
>I would recruit a graduate student into my lab and allow them to run with the project, providing guidance along the way.
You say to many phd students are used as disposable cheap labor, but what is the amount of people still learning stuff maybe bigger?
The problem is about the fresh talent pipeline for researchers (i.e. PhDs). In many ways, elementary school and a Master's degree are more alike than a Master's and a PhD in the sense that you're learning prior art with clearly defined exam/project assessments and no expectation of making something truly novel in both elementary school and the Master's, while a PhD is all about discovering something nobody uncovered before. So, calling this a problem of not wanting to teach isn't quite right.
IMO, the article is rather highlighting a different problem; the former problem in this area was that only a tiny sliver of the best engineering/CS undergrads wanted go into research given the far more lucrative industry careers, and now the supply part of that market is about to vanish too due to agentic AI. This will basically kill the concept of an academic career as we know it and the point of the article is that we need to find a different model of advancing and funding science.