One thing that I think gets lost in these debates is that those college professors who do amazing research and are terrible teachers are still important for soc

One thing that I think gets lost in these debates is that those college professors who do amazing research and are terrible teachers are still important for society and shouldn't be kicked to the curb. In my experience, these are the type of people who wouldn't be able to land on their feet particularly well outside the academic system - the unorthodox, unsociable weirdos who work on some obscure problem for years. These are also the types of people who occasionally make fundamental breakthroughs, or the ones whose dogged pursuit of a seemingly impractical goal ends up reaping unexpected rewards in terms of new discoveries. I wouldn't want to take a class with the versions of this type that I know, but I'm still glad they exist and have a home in academia. I just finished my first semester as a history professor and based on my experiences I very much agree that the current system of university education and especially administration would benefit from some kind of fundamental change. But university research is a separate issue, and I worry that trying to "disrupt universities" without thinking through the societal implications might end up harming this amazing apparatus for pursuing advanced research that the US has built up over the past century. I'd argue that those professors who are terrible teachers but amazing researchers have a real value and that we need to keep in mind that universities have always been about more than teaching. (The ultimate case in point is Oxford's All Souls College, which literally doesn't allow any students onto their campus without a letter of reference - but is nonetheless an amazing institution which has given the world real benefits).