Going well back in time, colleges were overwhelmingly devoted to teaching — the transmission of knowledge. Professors might do some research on their own time, but research was mostly done elsewhere. Today, that has been switched around. Many professors devote much of their time to research and little to teaching, and the trend is for that gap to continue widening.
Does this make sense? In today’s Martin Center article, David C. Phillips argues that it is a bad use of resources and proposes that we separate teaching from research.
He writes:
The current situation has come about because of the uneasy marriage of two related but ultimately distinct missions: the traditional mission of the university to transmit knowledge and mold character and the mission of the academy to discover, produce, and test that knowledge. The issue isn’t merely that the present arrangement allows ideologues and recalcitrant administrators to use research projects as human shields, howling miserably when failures to comply with federal regulations and their underlying values result in the withholding of federal funds. It is that the current arrangement is bad for both the education of students in the university and the pursuit of knowledge through research in the academy.
Correct, and the result is a flood of research and is written just to fill up pages and CV lines while the learning needs of students are largely ignored.
Read the whole thing.