[__bjoernd]

Over here in Germany, professors' job is "research and teaching". According to the internet, the author's university is a publicly funded university as well. I can see how AI can make you faster on the research side, but you give up 100% of the teaching/developing people part.

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.

[fasterik]

Teaching and research should be decoupled. Professors are hired and granted tenure primarily based on their ability to produce original research. The skillsets are different; often good researchers are bad teachers, and good teachers are bad researchers.

[rcarr]

There is a case to be made that teaching improves the understanding and insight of the teacher which in turn can increase their research ability. For starters, it provides a less boring way of drilling fundamentals. But more importantly, having to answer questions from students which very likely will be coming from odd and unexpected directions, helps the teacher clarify their thinking. It could well be that one of these odd questions, the answer for which the teacher takes for granted, may actually hold some insight or raise questions into what they are working on outside of class.

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.

[fasterik]

I tend to agree that teaching can clarify one's ideas, but I don't think the benefits are equal across the board. I think the argument for benefits to research are stronger when it comes to supervising graduate students and teaching seminars. I'm far less convinced that we should have math professors teaching Calc 1 if they're not really passionate about it, and I'm especially not in favor of tying up their salary and performance evaluation with it.

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.

[coolness]

This used to be the case: research was conducted mostly at academic institutions that did not provide degrees [1]. The "research university" is a relatively new thing

[1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research...

[i67vw3]

Interesting read. I always wondered from where did the idea about "thesis" & other "extra-circular" activities come from, for both students and professors.

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.

[sieste]

Even more important than the papers is whether you can raise the money required to fund your lab which produces your prestigious journal papers. And the further you go down the league table the less important the "prestigious" part gets.

[maxnoe]

Absolutely not. You could argue this for entry level lectures, but not at the PhD level. PhD is learning how to do original research, how could you separate teaching that from doing that?

[jcattle]

That's not entirely the case in Germany. Applicants need to give a lecture which is public. Usually members of the student union will be present and will have a say later within the hiring committee about the quality of teaching.

But I do agree that the ability to produce and procure research is not at all coupled with the ability to teach.

[MichaelRo]

>> Teaching and research should be decoupled.

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.

[graemep]

A lot of academics like teaching and think they benefit from it though. Richard Feynman thought so, and many academics I have met seem to as well. Not all.

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).

[crusty]

I would suggest 'more loosely coupled' perhaps, which in many cases they already are. Students may not want a surly, disinterested professor forced upon them because of a teaching requirement, but they won't want to miss out on great teachers forced to choose between teaching and researching. And as expressed by others, teaching and research reinforce each other to some degree. Teaching tests conceptual understanding and research incentivizes maintaining an understanding that tracks the knowledge limits of the field.

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.

[rob_c]

No. You should move students around more imo.

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).

[skywhopper]

In this sort of case the “teaching” happening with graduate assistants is teaching how to do research. That’s inextricably part of the job of a research professor, is to teach others how to do the job.

[dumpsterdiver]

Imagine a future classroom defined by elaborate plays performed by curious parents, all on advanced adjacent learning paths themselves. An intertwined learning structure that just keeps going up. At higher levels, instead of having the researcher with their head in the books communicating, they’ll have a whole team of people translating their knowledge into a production fit for antiquity - directors, diverse range of talents, charismatic performers, etc.

Assuming we have time to do this in some post-having-jobs world, of course.

[floro]

I agree. I studied at one of Europe's top "research universities". The most important courses often had the most famous profs, who also were either bad teachers or put no efford into their teaching.

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)

[noobermin]

So, I'm no professor, but as an ten year post-doc (unfortunately) I can say that most university groups benefit from both types. Again, the problem fundamentally is funding and the wrong incentives, as it always has been from before I entered grad school till now.

[nkmnz]

"Teaching" in OPs context probably doesn't mean lecturing, but 1:1 sessions with Junior Researchers from Master's Thesis upwards to PhD Candidates and Postdocs.

[jleyank]

No, they’re usually rated on the ability to bring in grant money.

[alvah]

You probably need to step outside of your US-centric bubble if you are to comment on how university works outside of the US. There was a fairly large clue in the parent comment.

[fasterik]

"Often good researchers are bad teachers, and good teachers are bad researchers" is a statement about humans, not a specific country, as far as I can tell. Sure, I happened to use the word "tenure" which is generally used in a U.S. context but you should be able to take a charitable reading of what I said and understand the broader point.

[philipwhiuk]

To my knowledge the view is correct for places outside the US.

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.

[alvah]

As mentioned in another comment, the US-centric view of how university and professorship work is certainly not the case in Germany.

[Molitor5901]

My experience at a research university, albeit 12 years ago, was that many of my professors loathed teaching. Some openly expressed disdain for the time they wasted teaching when they could be researching. I think a better framework in the future would be to have researchers, and lecturers/teaching professors separate. One is to teach, the other is to research.

[fyredge]

I disagree. Coming froma PhD background, the researchers that spend all of their time investigating the intricacies of their field are the most qualified to train up the next generation of researchers. This isn't primary and secondary schooling, where the syllabus evolves at a slow pace. To teach how to research, you need people doing the research.

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.

[whattheheckheck]

.01% lifetime earnings from all student directly to the teacher for life

[ua709]

If this gets implemented I suspect those auditorium style lectures will get a lot more teacher interest.

[MITSardine]

In the classic division, "teaching" consists in giving undergraduate classes, and "research" consists in the whole spectrum between working all on your own and managing a PhD factory (3+ students a year).

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.

[PapstJL4U]

I feel like people undervalue the learning experience of just being a workhorse for a while. It's a lot easier to do, make and correct errors when you start with the simpler stuff under guidance

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?

[cherryteastain]

Teaching an undergraduate class or even a graduate class is still teaching. The author does not say he won't do that anymore.

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.

[rob_c]

You've clearly never worked the academic sector. Calm down most researchers are hyper focused on their research productivity because at times 90%+ of their time is consumed by teaching for months at a time. This is an almost universal constant for all decent institutes globally. Taking on extra cheap labor in the form of grad students used to be the only way to do this but every single time this turns into onboarding someone for months to get weeks of work out of them. Great when you can hide it in your other side of your job, but most of the time you can't...