"Teaching Needs Priority"

What follows is part of the article, Teaching Needs Priority, written by Jonathan Richmond, Tech Senior Editor.

"...In the "research" university, the demands for "learning" in an integrated sense fall prey to the paper chase for money, prestige and tenure. A large proportion of MIT faculty must raise part of their salary from outside support. This need for funding leads to research which is likely to please sponsors, rather than to advance the general state of knowledge. Perhaps that is why there are many more professors who can help teach their students how to blow each other up rather than discuss how to live together in harmony and peace....Not only is teaching peripheral; in some cases the demands of money-seeking and administering leave too little time for actual academic research, which is delegated to graduate students who exist at the subservient end of a taskmaster-to-slave relationship. Undergraduate UROPs, meanwhile, too often become a cheap form of labor to perform the dirty work nobody else wants to touch. The artificial definition of a university in terms of "research," and, in particular, in terms of outside-sponsored research, is a prescription for a troubled education system...."

For obvious reasons I have left out a large portion of his article. If you wish to read it feel free to do so at this link. Feel free to leave any thoughts about his arguments.

I would have to say that I personally agree with my of the statements that were made [assuming that they were in fact true]. In my opinion the last two paragraphs, no included in what I have posted, are the best part of the entire article. It is at this point that he changes gears. He no longer talks about how the problem is affecting the faculty, students, and university; he instead mentions one individual's [a former dean of undergraduate education at MIT] ideas on how to solve the problem.