This is a big misconception regarding what professors do at research-oriented institutions. Teaching is why people get professorships at teaching universities,

This is a big misconception regarding what professors do at research-oriented institutions. Teaching is why people get professorships at teaching universities, where the main part of your job is to teach (typically 6-8 courses per year). If you are getting a job at a research-oriented university, you typically teach 1-3 courses per year, and the focus of your activity is on running a world-class research program (doing research, training PhD students, and raising money to pay those students / buy equipment, etc.). Teaching is still important and takes time, but you have a lot of other responsibilities. There are an enormous amount of pulls on a professor's time, though, and most work very long hours (my colleagues and I probably work 60-80 hours per week and we aren't at Harvard). I don't think it is appropriate to delegate teaching to TAs (I delegate much grading and help with homework assignments). Regarding pay for research assistants, there simply isn't a way to change this in the US. There just isn't enough government funding. To pay a single PhD student a stipend of around $30K per year for 20 hours of work per week* costs a budget around $60-80K with overhead and other factors per year. Many US agencies (e.g., NSF) only fund around $100-150K per year if you win a grant (7% success rate for many of them), so you can only fund 1-2 PhD students with that and you fought really hard to get that award to pay your students (lots of rejections). Most universities also won't let you pay them higher salaries, even if you want to as a professor. I used to complain about these things as a graduate student, but once you get the job (and have made a ton of budgets) you see the world differently. I'd love to change things, but don't blame the professors for things way out of their control. * 20 hours of work per week that's not related to their thesis, etc. Most of the time we are trying to get students funded on projects where that 20 hours of work does apply to their thesis, so that they get more out of it. They of course must work much more than 20 hours per week on their thesis project(s) to do cutting-edge work and graduate on time.