After tenure, it seems like profs drop down to a manageable 4-7 students in the disciplines I studied in. You can do that on 1-2 grants a year.
As others have previously mentioned it's a bit weird, because actually teaching is neither taught nor really supported by most research universities. It's often required, but not all that advantageous to do well.
I guess it depends on how you view an academic institution, is it to produce good thinkers or produce good work, although similar seems like you approach it in different ways when approaching it from one way or the other.
I'm not even upset with professors, I think Assistant Profs do the most work I've ever seen anyone ever do, its absolutely insane the crazy workload they take on to get tenure.
The advantage now of T type approaches is that, as the source points out so clearly, it gives you flexibility to grow, shift fields, and collaborate efficiently.
The article mentions, for example, maintaining the group's build system and making project logos. Different in kind, no?
PhD students should not be recruited with the expectation that they will do devops, software engineering, and graphic design work. Or, if that's the labor they're doing, universities should maybe start paying them a fair wage for their labor.
Building something like genenetwork.org in 1994 was exciting R&D for the time. Setting up a CI/CD pipeline or making a project logo in 2022 isn't.
Fully agree with you there---and for me, that was never the point of the article.
> Building something like genenetwork.org in 1994 was exciting R&D for the time. Setting up a CI/CD pipeline or making a project logo in 2022 isn't.
Yes, at the same time, maybe setting up CI/CD is needed nonetheless in order to better manage a shared codebase. My point is that PIs should be aware of these things and also recognise this sort of 'foundational' work whenever it happens. Of course, if a lab needs complex DevOps, then of course they should hire someone _dedicated_ for the role.
My observations pertain to the kind of work that happens behind the scenes and is often unrewarded and unrecognised. As I said: academia is doing a disservice to the people that are willing to (to re-use the example you supplied) set up a CI pipeline for their project or teach others how to write code cleanly, etc. Of course, the best approach would be to have dedicated roles for dedicated tasks in research (and beyond).
This is true for professors at research universities in grant fields. Their job is to bring in grants. Teaching is of minor importance in those fields, to the point that they don't need you to teach at all if you're that bad at it. Other fields don't have much in the way of grants, so teaching is given considerably more weight at all but the wealthiest institutions.
Whether the economisation of higher education is a good thing is a different question, of course. But in the UK there seems to be a strong drive towards separating teching and research. And to be honest, it becomes increasingly difficult to be good at teaching and research at the same time. If done properly, either is a full time job.
Teaching is generally under-valued across the board - graduate students are expected to teach as part of their PhD work very often, sometimes paid extra for this. I've seen some unscrupulous departments making no sincere attempts to help students finish their PhD on time, then turn around and offer up scraps like hourly teaching "contracts" to teach their classes, after their PhD funding has run out.
Separating teaching and research, if it leads to both being equal peers, can make sense. I fear, however, that teaching will continue to be the un-favoured step-sibling in institutions which have research income. Research income and grants let you build a fiefdom of underlings, but teaching generally doesn't - one professor can teach a class of 200, and run a couple of tutorial sessions with a team of 8 post-grad students.
The scaling of teaching is very attractive to the university, but it doesn't get the professor people under them, to make them more important.
I've seen people be hired into "active teaching" academic roles who are manifestly incapable of teaching. Their "research track record" seemingly made up for their car-crash presentation to the department during the interview process. After the pile of (entirely foreseeable, by anyone at the presentation) student complaints flooded in, they ended up not needing to teach. There's definitely an implicit assumption that "teaching is easy, and anyone can do it" lingering around in a lot of departments.
I don't think we should entirely split research and teaching - it's very much possible to be T-shaped and good at both. Indeed, being able to engage a room full of tired students first thing on a Monday morning is a skill many academic presenters would benefit from having, purely in learning how to better communicate their research. Unless departments take a much wider, more holistic view of what is expected though, this won't be valued or change, as far as I can see at least.
That is getting increasingly difficult to pull off, since students (and attorneys) have figured out thatched can sue the university of the don‘t fulfil their part of the PhD agreement. Universities are totally paranoid about being sued, and all sorts of administrative arse-covering is the result.
That being said this is from my experience and am unsure how it is at other schools.