Someone discovers that a friend or neighbour is a university professor and asks what seems like the most obvious question in the world:
“What do you teach?”
Ian Bogost points out in his recent (excellent) Atlantic essay that for some academics, this can be an unexpectedly awkward question. Not because teaching is unimportant, at least officially, but because it may not be the part of the job their institution values most.
That stopped me.
My own life in higher education is almost the reverse. I move from business school to business school. I do not run a research lab. I barely attend committees. Most of the time, I just teach.
And I mean that quite literally as the point of the job. I tell every class some version of the same thing: I teach because I love it. I build everything fresh for them. I use what I teach in the real world. I do not count the hours. I care. Then I usually add that if I won the LOTO tomorrow, I would still turn up for class. “Don’t tell the school,” I say, because they may take that as a negotiating position.
Which means that most of what I understand about universities comes from classrooms, corridors, cafeterias, students arriving before class and conversations that continue long after it.
From there, the idea that teaching is somehow the secondary activity feels rather strange.
Bogost mentions one particularly revealing piece of university vocabulary: the teaching buyout. Successful researchers can sometimes use grant funding to reduce their teaching obligations.
Read that slowly.
Success in one part of the university can literally purchase your way out of another.
And incentives matter.
Research can bring grants, rankings, prestige and career advancement. Excellent teaching often brings another course to teach, a stack of student evaluations and, if you are lucky, an email several years later saying something you did mattered.
Yet students keep showing up under the quaint impression that education is what the place is for. And to be honest, I have always thought that was a perfectly reasonable assumption. Students are not interrupting the serious work of the university by wanting to be taught. They are the serious work.
But perhaps the degradation of teaching is not a secondary consequence of higher education’s problems. Perhaps it sits much further upstream.
Demote teaching and the rest follows. Classes get bigger. Contact gets thinner. Assessment gets standardised. Faculty incentives move elsewhere. Students and professors grow more distant. Eventually, the university starts producing something different from what students thought they came for.
And then AI arrives.
Suddenly universities are deeply concerned that students are outsourcing the intellectual work of education.
Fair enough.
But I think there’s an uncomfortable symmetry here. Students are being told not to outsource the work of learning by institutions that have spent decades rewarding academic success in ways that often make teaching less central, not more.
AI did not create that contradiction.
It just made it much harder not to see.