[dekhn]

You have a pretty rosy view of professors. I don't think being a professor means you've won any academic games.

You don't get to take sabbaticals when you want. Professors have a lot of people to answer to- granting agencies, deans, students, and more.

[frozenport]

>>Professors have a lot of people to answer to

Nope. The agencies you mentioned effect their ability to grow, their formal employer is the University. If their research goes to hell they can teach a class and make the same amount of money. Sometimes their students are completely free (TAs).

Having seen professors give projects they know dont work and falsify work under vagious euphemisms, they are the problem with academia - they provide little value but somehow run the show. This is especially true for less mathematically difficult fields like biology.

[dekhn]

I used to be a postdoc at berkeley and I've seen older professors exited from the university to make room for younger ones- even though they were extremely good teachers.

You can't make the same amount of money just teaching classes- professors have to bring in money to pay their summer salaries.

Note, also, that the general trend in universities has been to move away from full professorships- while the tenure program is great, it reduces the freedom of the administration when it comes to dealing with low performers (I'm not making a value judgement, just an observation).

It don't know what it means for biology to be less mathematically difficult (I'm a biophysicist by training and I assure you the math is pretty hard, especially when you get into grad-level quantum chemistry).

[frozenport]

>>It don't know what it means for biology to be less mathematically difficult

It means that wet lab biology can be learned after a few years of work, making professors less valuable as a source of knowledge.

>>grad-level quantum chemistry I would be suprised if the guys running the elisa have more than second semester calculus. Certainly not a requirement for undergrads at our school.

[dekhn]

You're talking about technical work, not biology. The same applies to any number of other domains. Sounds to me like you just have a chip on your shoulder.

[frozenport]

>>You're talking about technical work, not biology.

Well, people get PhD for it. Tell them its not biology :-)

>>just have a chip on your shoulder

Yeah, I blame the academic system

[dekhn]

Nobody gets a PhD for doing lab work. People get PhDs for publishing papers and they do lab work because there isn't enough grant money or capable techs for doing really hard experiments.