This is an interesting perspective. I didn't intend to "frame the academics as the bad guys" but I can see how it came off that way.
To be blunt, I don't think that the current generation's academics are at fault at all. This rotten system was built decades before they came on the field, and they're just trying to survive in it.
I'm putting blame, mostly, on the older generations: the Boomers, the Silents, and the "Greatest" Generation. They had it so good that they must have assumed that they could just ignore the teaching part of the job, so they devalued it, creating a state where even those who want to focus on teaching aren't rewarded for it.
I don't even fault specific people. I fault the tenure system. I understand its value, but I also see how it allows the older, comfortable generation to behave in a way that hurts the young. The blow-off-the-teaching attitude isn't something I see in most 30-year-old professors (and, to the extent that it exists, it's a rational response to a system that doesn't reward it at all). It's something that started decades ago. The tenured professor, who could blow off his teaching and administrative duties with minimal consequence, could say to his juniors, "I get five papers out per year, so I don't see why you can't do it." Academia has this weird dichotomous system where you're either almost impossible to fire (tenured) or treated as human garbage, with nothing in-between.
Of course, university administrators and politicians are also at fault, but one has to wonder why they've decided to impoverish academia. Many of those administrators are ex-academics, and the politicians' anti-intellectualism and resentment of academia has to come from somewhere. To blame academics entirely is to miss a lot, for sure, but one has to assign to them (again, with blame falling most on the older or retired ones who were most influential when this mess began) a fair share of the responsibility.
To start the flood of anecdotes, I'll suggest my old digital circuits professor who never returned homework, ignored the textbook and was never present for lab help. His grades always came out weeks late. And he started doing that long before he got tenure. Because he was a prolific researcher with lots of grant money coming in.
So tenure wasn't to blame - its an effect, not a cause.
To be blunt, I don't think that the current generation's academics are at fault at all. This rotten system was built decades before they came on the field, and they're just trying to survive in it.
I'm putting blame, mostly, on the older generations: the Boomers, the Silents, and the "Greatest" Generation. They had it so good that they must have assumed that they could just ignore the teaching part of the job, so they devalued it, creating a state where even those who want to focus on teaching aren't rewarded for it.
I don't even fault specific people. I fault the tenure system. I understand its value, but I also see how it allows the older, comfortable generation to behave in a way that hurts the young. The blow-off-the-teaching attitude isn't something I see in most 30-year-old professors (and, to the extent that it exists, it's a rational response to a system that doesn't reward it at all). It's something that started decades ago. The tenured professor, who could blow off his teaching and administrative duties with minimal consequence, could say to his juniors, "I get five papers out per year, so I don't see why you can't do it." Academia has this weird dichotomous system where you're either almost impossible to fire (tenured) or treated as human garbage, with nothing in-between.
Of course, university administrators and politicians are also at fault, but one has to wonder why they've decided to impoverish academia. Many of those administrators are ex-academics, and the politicians' anti-intellectualism and resentment of academia has to come from somewhere. To blame academics entirely is to miss a lot, for sure, but one has to assign to them (again, with blame falling most on the older or retired ones who were most influential when this mess began) a fair share of the responsibility.