What's the Point of a Professor?

This article seems more reflective of a generational technology gap than an actual loss of student interest in building relationships with professors. The author doesn&#x27;t seem to want to bother leveraging all the wonderful tools currently available to interact digitally with students beyond the walls of a classroom or office.<p>I give my students my phone number and encourage texting. I find that sending Facebook messages usually gets a quicker response than emails. And, in lieu of office hours, I prefer Google Hangouts so we can be more flexible with meeting times. (Yes... I&#x27;ve had many &quot;office hour&quot; sessions at 11:00 at night!)<p>Contrary to what this article asserts, I&#x27;ve found that digital technologies bring me closer to my students. Using tools like Facebook Groups, Google Docs, and whatever course forum software the school is operating on at the time, I get to expand the classroom well beyond our 2.5 hours per week and create a sort of 24&#x2F;7 learning environment.<p>I wish I could have had those kinds of opportunities as an undergrad.

I&#x27;ll have to agree that it&#x27;s a huge shame students don&#x27;t interact with their professors more. I think that my interactions with one of my professors influenced me much more than the time I spent in all of my classes.<p>On the other hand, the current education system doesn&#x27;t seem to lend itself well to student professor interactions since it seems professors are given tenure based off research and not teaching, not that I necessarily think that&#x27;s wrong.

The point of a professor is that they will actually tell you you did something wrong and why what you did was wrong. In the real world, as an adult, you rarely get that luxury from an expert.

Came across this after finishing viewing a lecture on MIT OpenCourseWare.<p>I graduated a long time ago (from a comparable school, but alas, not MIT), but still revisit certain subjects from time to time.<p>Considering the level of interaction I usually had with most professors, it makes me think:<p>Perhaps at the undergraduate level, &quot;lectures&quot; should be videos, and treated just as textbooks - as course material.<p>Clearly, not all lecturers are created equal. If you take 20 tenured professors doing research, who all understand some undergraduate level subject forwards, backwards, and upside down - they won&#x27;t all be equally good at presenting it.<p>So make the lectures another (paid for) source to learn from. Over time, they&#x27;ll only get better and better, with feedback. If that happened, there would still be a need for college as we know it. Students will have questions, need to do work to understand material, and need feedback (grading) to grow. They would of course also benefit from working and learning with other students.<p>With this model, the best undergraduate college would be the one with the best TAs&#x2F;&quot;professors&quot; (ones who did grading and explaining, but that was their focus.) If you value working with other students of similar intelligence and motivation levels, perhaps that&#x27;s where the selectivity&#x2F;prestigiousness of the school might come in and provide that (but if you bother to respond, let&#x27;s not focus on that bit.)<p>I think that would make for a much better experience for all. Graduate school would still exist of course, and I&#x27;d imagine more research oriented professors would be happy to spend more time with their grad level students. Grad students would still be evaluated for admission to a program based on their mastery of the undergrad concepts - only under this system they&#x27;d at least ALL have the benefit of being lectured by the best qualified to do so.<p>Further, it would be far easier for prospective students to evaluate where they&#x27;d spend their four years after high school based on things like admissions rates from undergrad to top level grad schools, and&#x2F;or job placement rates - as these would reflect just how good the TAs&#x2F;course administrators were at aiding the students at mastering the subjects.<p>Perhaps people might respond to me along the lines of, &quot;umm, that&#x27;s pretty much what undergrad is right now&quot;, but it just wasn&#x27;t my experience. A majority (no, not all) of the professors seemed much more interested in their research, rather than teaching, i.e. burning through powerpoint slides and jetting.

The point of a professor at a research university is to interact with graduate students. At a teaching college they should be interacting with undergraduates.

This is so interesting, and especially frustrating (for both instructors and students) because really, most of the time only tenured faculty have the luxury of pushing back against the norm to really engage with students more outside of class and go beyond just being graders.

At a University the point of a professor is to get grants.

What&#x27;s the point of books?