Yep, as the article notes, the reason for this is simple: Universities don't employ teachers, they employ academics. Professors are pretty much universally rese

Yep, as the article notes, the reason for this is simple: Universities don't employ teachers, they employ academics. Professors are pretty much universally researchers, not teachers. Teachers know all these things, that if most people in the class don't know how to use commas, you teach them that, or if they don't know how to debug, you teach them that. Teachers don't tell students to quit a subject because they don't know all its fundamentals already, they are there to teach. But academics aren't there to teach, they are there to find new academics to work with. And certainly it's a quicker and easier path for that goal, to focus their time on students who already know everything. But the article is spot that this is a bad thing and is a major hindrance to our society's ability to educate people. And it's also a hindrance to our ability to do research! To a person, all my professor friends hate teaching undergraduate courses, both because they know they are bad at it (they aren't teachers!) and because it is a huge distraction from their research (which is their actual profession!). Most undergraduate courses, certainly for the first couple years, should be taught by people trained as educators, who also have advanced knowledge of the fundamentals of the subject they are teaching (which is generally not true of high school teachers, for instance). By the graduate level, most time should be spent on learning how to contribute to real academic research in the field, and professors are the right partner for that, for sure. The last couple years of undergrad should be a mix of these two, maybe by flipping the professor / teaching assistant relationship to instead have a primary teacher with a professor assistant. Teaching material more advanced than the high school level is an important niche that we do an awful job of.