> Teaching is a distraction to the real work that goes on in universities.

This is the most concise statement I've ever seen of the sickness at the heart of the academy. By and large, and with a few heroic exceptions, professors don't value instruction. It's why I was told my ambition to improve the preparation of engineering graduates through better instruction was a fool's errand, "career suicide" in my advisor's words. And it's why I took my Ph.D. and left academia. This attitude is going to come back and bite them when the marks wise up.

Your adviser was right though. If there was an infinite amount of money then they'd have lecturers who are dedicated to lecturing. But there is never enough money so...what options are there but to do the things that will bring more in so that your role/group/department/university survives.

I've seen it myself...groups whither and disappear due to lack of funds.

You're right, of course, there's no place for teachers in the academy, except as members of that most degraded and despised class, contingent faculty. But I think this is a serious problem. Not to put too fine a point on it, but many recipients of engineering degrees being turned out by our well-respected institutions of higher learning can't engineer their way out of a wet paper bag. I worked with people who didn't understand the physical models underlying their discipline. I worked with people who didn't trust statistics, who were easily misled by noise in their data and preferred to eyeball regression lines. I worked with one individual who somehow had a B.S. in electrical engineering despite having real trouble with the concept of plotting points on a Cartesian coordinate plane. These people had degrees from R1 universities. The indifference of career academics to these outcomes is a disaster. It's a disaster I'd hoped to avert, but I can only do my best to get out of its way.

No doubt about it. People made it through 4 years of my CS degree from a good university, and couldn't code a line. However these people all found their place in the workforce which suited their own skills.

I'm not sure how much can be done at the teaching level, but like you, it's something I'd also like to help correct.

I can easily accept it in some European country where government pays for it all. I have much harder time to accept this paradigm in USA, where 19 years old are paying a lot of money or going into debt just so they can study at the university.

Yes, college graduates do better then non college graduates which is why those people still do it. But since they are paying a lot of money, university literally owns them more then just "you are a distraction".

> where 19 years old are paying a lot of money or going into debt just so they can study at the university.

True enough. My Euro-centric brain didn't consider this. Even in Europe actually, non-European students pay a lot to join a course.

My sense is that American unis do offer some "value for money" when compared to European schools, through flexible options for minors and majors, and grad school. Maybe the teachers are still poor though.

Do undergraduate fees contribute to a faculty's research funding? And if not why are student fees so high, if there is such a low (albeit understandable) emphasis on undergraduate teaching?

In my country (and all of Europe) no. The fees are a nominal administration fee, which admittedly is crawling higher each year. The government, and the EU, then funds each student, and yeah that money would help with research.

I'd suggest that faculty don't want there to be a low emphasis on teaching, it's just that there aren't enough resources to do the critical tasks first. This is bearing in mind that teaching duties are always fulfilled either way (just not to the satisfaction of some people).

I think our difference in perspective is a result of our experience with different systems. I've met a number of professors who expressed contempt toward the undergraduate population at the Big State U where I did my graduate studies. It's not that they're reluctantly doing a bad job at teaching, they're doing a bad job and they really don't care.