The PhD first really became a requirement for professors wanting to teach at SLACs around the 1940s. Prior to that point, it wasn't that uncommon for you to fi

The PhD first really became a requirement for professors wanting to teach at SLACs around the 1940s. Prior to that point, it wasn't that uncommon for you to find teachers that "only" had BAs. This transition (a BA being the minimum to a PhD being the minimum) occurred substantially earlier at large universities [0]. During the period between the 1940s and the late 80s-ish, the PhD involved research, but not with nearly the same competitiveness as today. As such, budding candidates were able to devote substantially more time to developing their pedagogical skills (even in the past this viewed more like an extracurricular pursuit, but a lot of PhDs took it seriously enough that they got really good at it). The folks who came out of this era had dual competencies in teaching and research. The need for research skills primarily was to help more advanced and motivated students (juniors and seniors) to get some limited research experience on-campus. Sometime between the late 90s and early 2000s, the balance in competencies shifted due to hyper-competitiveness. As a result, almost no PhD students today really focus on pedagogy and it is still treated as an increasingly neglected extra-curricular pursuit. This has become a very big problem for SLACs, since almost all PhDs coming out now are enculturated to feel that they have to create a large research program, and almost view working at a SLAC as a "backup" option if they don't land a large university job rather than a goal in and of itself. SLACs have had to compensate for this by offering increasingly attractive incentives / research starter packages to get new faculty. This trend is also being aggravated by helicopter parents who now insist that their children participate in research at increasingly younger ages (oftentimes high school) so as to pad their resumes for med school. [0] https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/octopus.html https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/octopus.html Disclaimer: Source for some of this is free recall from a temporary job in SLAC archive. Some of it may be wrong. Visit a SLAC archive if you care enough to verify.