An indictment of university research and teaching priorities

From an article at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Universities are aggressively seeking federal dollars to build bigger and fancier laboratory facilities, and are not paying an equal amount of attention to teaching and nurturing the students...

Teaching is suffering at universities because the institutions prize research success above all other factors in promotions, they said. The job of educating students offers little reward, and instead "often carries the derogatory label 'teaching load,'"...

... universities have become so obsessed with using federal dollars to build new research facilities that they've skewed their priorities, leading both faculty members and students to see the competition for federal money as their main professional mission.

Mr. Mann, who served as chairman of biochemistry at Vermont from 1984 to 2005, said grant money made up about 22 percent of his salary as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota back in 1970. Now it's 60 percent, as he pulls in about $3-million a year in federal support, and administrators at Vermont are asking him to push it even higher...

The article has drawn a lot of commentary, including this observation:

Some of the emphasis on pulling in research funding can be traced to the shift in how public higher education institutions are funded. Prior to the anti-tax era, many of our 'public' institutions were funded at 80% by states using tax revenues. With the over emphais on tax cuts for the past 30 years, we are seeing the impacts in higher ed.

Now many (most) big institutions received closer to 10% from the states. The higher funding levels funded operations and permitted reasonable tuition rates. With less funding, universities rely more on tuition, loans, and indirect costs from research grants to make up funding formerly provided by the states...

The article strikes a chord with me.  I entered academia in the late '70s, and the Chairman at my first faculty appointment greeted me with a pat on the back and the comment "We'd like you to do some research while you're here."  Within twenty years I saw a dramatic shift in emphasis.  Faculty were expected to earn a much higher proportion of their salary from research grants, corporations had taken a much larger role within the universities, and teaching of students had begun to be viewed by many faculty as an impediment to their careers.  Those changes in the environment contributed to my decision to opt for early retirement.