I’m just starting as a graduate student after spending two years moving pieces of paper around an office. Perhaps I will be proved wrong, but I have a feeling that research and teaching may prove much more interesting than basic admin, especially as excessive administrative burden seems to be one of the biggest complaints of academics in the UK.

One career track would be focused on teaching undergraduates. These teachers would have PhDs and would be full-time, tenure-track employees (not adjuncts, as many colleges use today). They would be hired, tenured, and promoted based on their willingness and ability to teach a relatively heavy course load, much of it at the entry level (especially in fields that include a distribution requirement for all majors).

The other career track would be focused on research. These professors would also have PhDs and would be full-time, tenure-track employees. They would be hired, tenured, and promoted based on their ability to bring in grants and to do high-quality research.

These categories would not be exclusive. Instructors would be given some free time to do research if they so chose. Researchers might be tasked with teaching a couple of upper-division seminars. And there would be the opportunity to move from one track to another if vacancies permitted.

Professors in both tracks would have the same pay at the same levels, and similar job titles. For instance, an instructor might be titled “Assistant Professor of Political Science Instruction,” while his research colleague would be “Assistant Professor of Political Science Research.”

The ratio between instructors and researchers would vary between departments. For instance, English might have a bunch of instructors, but only one researcher in the department (or none at all in small colleges). Hard science would be closer to an even split, or maybe even somewhat tilted towards researchers. Social science would be somewhere in-between.

The job of “professor” is currently two largely unrelated jobs stitched together. There’s no reason to believe that the best researchers are also the best people to teach low-level courses to undergraduates. Let’s make this plain and transparent and almost everyone will be happier.

I mostly agree with Tim’s point, and was about to say something similar. Good teaching requires a kind of mental commitment that is nearly impossible to muster if you don’t get some joy out of it (or at least see it as valuable and part of your craft—not something that you have to suffer through for the sake of research). I would only change Tim’s example from actor to, say, doctor or secondary school teacher. They’re both extremely important services and the former, like university teaching, is really expensive. So imagine a doctor who says she hates her patients and only likes research, or a high school teacher who hates students but loves administrative work. They may be perfectly competent, but I’d really rather have someone else tending to my medical needs, or teaching my kids.

There are a lot of people who actually like teaching. Enough, in fact, that I don’t think it is a wise use of college funds to employ people in the humanities who do not like to teach. Everyone who went to college as an undergraduate remembers that one professor who obviously considered his (or her) teaching to be a burdensome chore. The classes were boring and lifeless, and they sucked. With dozens of aspiring PhDs for every job opening, I don’t see why we should be hiring those people for tenure-track positions.

I suppose things might be different in the hard sciences. If someone is doing cutting-edge biology or chemistry research, you can credibly argue that this is more important than teaching undergraduates. (I still think there’s a real problem in the fact that we conflate the two essentially unrelated roles of teacher and researcher into the same job description. In practice, it often amounts to a game of bait-and-switch played on the students.)

On the other hand, if you’re a professor in English, I don’t think you can credibly claim that your research is more important than teaching undergraduates, or, indeed, that it has any value at all. Virtually no one will ever read it, and most of it is so densely written that no one could understand it even if they did make the attempt. And, let’s face it, there’s nothing you can say about Shakespeare or Homer that hasn’t been said a thousand times before (and probably in a clearer, more understandable manner). We should stop the ridiculous pretense of “research” in the humanities, and professors in those departments should be chosen for teaching abilities, not on their ability to crank out worthless articles that no one cares about. If necessary, designate one or two departments in the country to do research, and let everyone else concentrate on teaching.

I’m pretty sure that quite a few very good actors did think this, at least after a short while. If I recall correctly Cary Grant, for example, claimed to hate acting (and most everything else, but in particular acting) even during the height of his career. Surely liking your job raises the chances that you’ll do it well, but it’s obviously not a necessary condition for doing so.

I wouldn’t call it a taboo. It’s more, at least for me, that I have a hard time reconciling my own experience of teaching with your claim that you can both hate teaching and do it very well. Your analogy to other jobs is part of what’s leading you astray. If an actor said, “I hate acting, I absolutely loathe it”, we’d wonder how it was possible that that actor still managed to give moving dramatic performances. We wouldn’t wonder if that actor was able to do a perfectly good job pitching detergent in a commercial, on the other hand.

Really good teaching seems to me to be something that requires a strong quality of emotional investment in both the act of teaching and in the desire for students to learn. But it’s somewhat dependent on subject and on the size of the classroom. A beginning science lecture to a classroom of 400 students might be more like the actor in the commercial: something that anyone with the necessary knowledge and basic presentation skills could do credibly. A small discussion-oriented seminar in the humanities? I just don’t see how you can do that well if you’re hating every minute of it every time you do it.

So what is the deal anyway? This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten this response. When I say I don’t like teaching people respond as if I’d said I don’t like sex and fake orgasm. Now I’m ‘satiably curious about what’s behind these taboos—why the outrage?

is not a shite instructor. There are legions of professors with this attitude, especially in technical fields, and we’ve probably all suffered through the results in the classroom. But what does it matter—they’re probably just teaching students who will go on to do some “pink collar shit work” anyway.

And as for the worth of your research – one in a hundred of you will make a genuine contribution to scholarship. The rest will write “The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485” over and over again. But you will all teach. If you do your jobs well, you will all raise the level of public discourse and awaken minds to new possibilities. If you do it poorly, you’ll damage them and alienate them. That’s your important work, not your precious research.

You’d better believe my students get value for their money. I may not like teaching but I give it all I’ve got and I’m good at what I do. I find the rhetoric of “x is unhappy here” that appears on supervisory evaluations as code for “we’d like x to go somewhere else but don’t have any good reason to kick her out” the worst sort of disingenuous bs.

Where does the idea that one is supposed to ENJOY one’s work come from? If we enjoyed it, we wouldn’t have to be paid for it, dammit, and for most human beings the work we do is the least worst alternative to starving. We work our butts off to get PhDs so that we can be among the lucky few who actually enjoy some aspects of our jobs—a privilege that most people can’t even dream of.

Being an academic, and getting the chance to do original research, is the pearl of great price. We sacrifice to get that—we take on risk, we kill ourselves to get tenure, we sacrifice wages that we could be getting if we did those better paid jobs in the Real World and we pay for the privilege of doing research and working at a job that pervades our entire lives by teaching, serving on committees, etc. That’s perfectly fair and in fairness we give our all to those duties.