Hmmm; while MIT doesn't have a truly huge endowment (its management of all that sort of thing was downright criminal until the '90s, details on request, and it

Hmmm; while MIT doesn't have a truly huge endowment (its management of all that sort of thing was downright criminal until the '90s, details on request, and it then managed to benefit from the following financial bubbles), it can get away with hiring those sorts of research professors. With exceptions that prove the rule, like SF author Joe Haldeman, all professors are tenured or tenure track, they only get tenure by being #1 or #2 in their field (very occasionally #3, and this is strongly enforced in multiple ways), and that of course means they're able to support themselves with grant money (plus one day a week to otherwise earn money). And they must be adequate teachers, and I came across/knew of very few who weren't serious and sincere about education, although of course their ability varied. And this is enforced a whole bunch of ways post-tenure, e.g. I witnessed a case where a professor a lot of us have heard about was sat down by the head of his department (who I worked for at the time) and forced to read all the student evaluations of a course he'd just taught, which were all strongly negative except for another exception that proved the rule (we'd read them prior to the confrontation), and was then told he'd never teach that course again, he'd screwed up so badly. Anyway, yeah, I can see all your points, which reinforce what I've been reading and occasionally witnessing starting in the '70s. One might more broadly correlate it with caviler way colleges and universities let students take on massive debt with all too often little chance of repaying it in a reasonable amount of time, the massive bloat of administrators, and how the latter are wresting more control from the faculty ... too many of these institutions just aren't all that serious about undergraduate education.