The idea is that you want the people on the leading edge teaching, otherwise you'll end up with the same problem that colleges have where faculty may be good at

The idea is that you want the people on the leading edge teaching, otherwise you'll end up with the same problem that colleges have where faculty may be good at teaching, but don't update their knowledge and track state of the art. I'm not at all against colleges and trade schools, they have their place, but I don't agree that we should turn our universities into into them. It's perfectly fine to have a separation. Traditionally colleges and trade schools have been focused on training a workforce, and universities have been places to go to get a broader, but not necessarily trade focused education. There are many other complaints about university education that essentially boil down to people wishing they were trade schools. E.g. why don't they teach popular industry language X? Why don't they teach unit testing, agile programming, etc? Without having research faculty doing the teaching, I think you lose what traditionally has been the strength of a university education: teachers with state of the art knowledge teaching people to push the boundaries of how they think.