You do realize that you cannot get tenure without publishing many, many, relevant pieces of work, right? You also realize that to teach something you need to re

You do realize that you cannot get tenure without publishing many, many, relevant pieces of work, right? You also realize that to teach something you need to really understand it, correct? On the other hand, you can certainly apply knowledge without understanding it. Your statement is insulting to anyone who values knowledge, teaching it, and pursuing it. Perhaps you are not a native english speaker, but your statement is very easy to read as implying that only those who cannot do [what? research? engineering?] teach, and only those who are lousy teachers get tenure. It is an indefensible position and your obvious hostility towards modern academia is unjustified. For one academics don't necessarily want to teach. But as a society we deemed that we will in essence force them to. Why? We need good teachers and goodness knows industry won't waste money on it, let alone have any sort of quality control. So we force these people who have devoted their lives to research to also teach. As for tenure, it is often attacked as something protecting poor researchers. I think this notion is very much overblown. In modern times you cannot even get tenure before you are 35 or 40. If you look at those with tenure, the majority continue to do good work for the remainder of their careers. That aside, the main purpose of tenure is actually to protect the pursuit of knowledge. It exists to prevent management from dictating what people may research. It is to allow researchers to pursue risky or unpopular approaches. Academics do what they do because they primarily enjoy research. Insinuating that they are incapable of doing this simply because they also teach and are granted the protection of tenure is very insulting.