There are a lot of commonly held misconceptions about the job of a professor in your comment, so I will break it down line by line. Note that this is simply for

There are a lot of commonly held misconceptions about the job of a professor in your comment, so I will break it down line by line. Note that this is simply for laying down the reality of today's professor job market rather than advocating that it should be one way or another. > Teaching is the reason why professors are there. This is a commonly held belief by non-academics. It is not one held by academics at R1 schools. Note that there are many lower level universities (not R1) at which the teaching is sometimes quite good. There are also very real things called "teaching colleges". If someone wants to go to a place with great teachers, they largely should not go to an R1 school. > If you can't/don't want to teach you should be a professional researcher and admit that. Being a professor at an R1 school is basically making the claim that you are a researcher -- one who happens to teach from time to time. > That is what the tax payers support when supporting universities. (Via tutiion, etc.. [grants are not considered in this]) Are you sure about that? This is a potentially huge discussion, but "teaching" is not high on the list of added value if you attend an R1 school. In fact, the instruction is often terrible. The idea is that you will be given access to resources, and smart, motivated people know how to avail themselves of useful resources. Taxpayers get research labs that spawn new industries, develop mature industries, and contribute to high value-add labor markets (great for local economy). Students get access to bleeding edge research, researchers, and tools. Much tuition these days goes towards facilities that the people who can pay want (e.g., nicer dorms, gyms, etc.). Note that many of the top student scholars at R1 schools pay little or no tuition. One could also argue that people pay tuition for access to certain social circles -- social capital is a real thing with real value at a wide range of R1 schools. I could go on, but the value derived from how tuition and taxpayer money is used is a deep and complex topic. > The current setup where a professor can delegate teaching to TAs, and overwork/underpay assistents/juniors is ethically wrong, often illegal in work practices (payment below min wage), and fraudulent to the students paying tuition. The delegation part is fine -- the content of the classes that have TAs is not terribly challenging or interesting to a professional in the field, so delegating it (especially for large classes) is an intelligent allocation of human resources. That said, the illegal parts you mentioned are terrible and should not happen. To be fair, the only cases I've directly seen of overly worked TA/RA labor was when the grad student was doing something wrong (e.g., grading with heuristics that were overly granular). That said, I have read stories, and I believe that they are true at least in part if not in whole.