system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Terrible professors - why can't teaching and research be separated?

I'm doing a masters course in Europe and I'm honestly shocked at the number of terrible professors teaching me here. Out of all the courses I've taken this year, maybe one had a prof who I'd call a good teacher. My university isn't some local university either, it's pretty well known internationally (in the QS top 100). It's frustrating because it seems like some of them are completely aware of their incompetence when it comes to teaching but just don't care or try to improve it.

One particular prof who teaches econometrics, which at the masters level is pretty mathematically dense and should require at least minimal use of a blackboard, literally just reads off the slides in his lectures. He doesn't try to solve anything for us, just "if you solve this, you get this" and moves on. What's even worse is that his slides are EXACTLY copied from the book, they're literally just the books split into smaller chunks. So in his lectures he reads out the book to us essentially. I asked someone who was in the course last year and he said that the prof was famous for being terrible. When this guy has been teaching the course for a few years now like this, probably receiving horrible feedback each time, I don't get why he himself or the university doesn't do anything.

I think terrible professors are so common because they don't have an incentive to try and get better at their job. They're hired for their research, consider that as their main job and hence really don't give a shit about whether their students are learning or not. But why does it have to be like this? Why aren't research and teaching considered separate and equally important jobs? Why aren't profs held accountable for their horrible teaching?
gpt
For tenure-track professors at R1s, the calculus is simple: at the end of six years, if they excel in research but are marginal at teaching, they get to keep their jobs (basically permanently). If they excel at teaching but are marginal at research, they're going to be unemployed. It's not a hard choice to make.