Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith for August 02, 2014

Pithy.

The slight difference being in that you usually have to do your job right and produce useful results. And you can’t plagiarize or steal from others to justify your continued employment unless you are management.

Yeah, except that the job of a teacher is to teach, not to spend most of his time researching esoterica and trying to get anything in print. So Person from Anywhere Else misses the point altogether.

Person from anywhere knows how its supposed to be.

It’s my belief that most of the grants from which the publications result do not pay for themselves, ie, for the faculty time necessary to do the actual work. Thus, the more research and publication a university achieves, the more money it loses. But that’s OK, we’ll just get the students to subsidize it. And that, I believe, is why tuitions have risen so astronomically in the last twenty years or so.

Is an academic’s job to teach, or to publish?

I’ve known some good professors, fine teachers, who had to transfer to other colleges because they were not able to “publish.” One had a manuscript put together but was unable to find a publisher who would print it. A waste of talent.