I hear you. There is a distinctly different skill set between "Pushing the boundary of human knowledge" and "Teaching an intro class well." Universities and t

I hear you. There is a distinctly different skill set between "Pushing the boundary of human knowledge" and "Teaching an intro class well." Universities and tenure have historically been built on this being a high correlation. Reality is that sometimes it happens, sometimes not. Universities need to decouple the teaching from the research. Some of that is leveraging the best pure teachers available. At my grad school, the joke was that Nobels were more important for admissions than academics.