Universities are a business, who gives a damn about teaching??

My thesis supervisor told me today that the university's cutting down courses and cutting down on the number of staff. She also told me that the Uni of Melbourne, not where I'm from, will be introducing a graduate program and will be cutting 10,000 students from its enrolment over the next 10 years. All the money that universities are getting are from doing research. It's true. That's what they are doing at QUT too, the dean sacked half of his staff and hired researchers instead. Not people who are good at teaching, but people who can actually bring money into the uni! So no one cares about teaching anymore. You can be the lousiest teacher but the university will hire you as long as you can bring in research grants. Kind of a sad state to be in, I thought you go to uni to learn, but apparently not, you just contribute to their business and maybe you'll learn something along the way! No wonder so many uni lecturers are crap. There's absolutely NO incentive to teach. You don't even get paid additional to teach a subject. And hear this, if you've been selected to teach, you can actually PAY OUT a figure of 16K AUD to the university so that they hire someone else from outside the uni to teach the subject.

It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next few years. People will go to uni but they'll be complaining that the lecturers are all crap. No wonder we get people who know crap who work in "the real world", because the lecturers teaching them are crap in the first place.

According to dictionary.com, a university is

1. An institution for higher learning with teaching and research facilities constituting a graduate school and professional schools that award master's degrees and doctorates and an undergraduate division that awards bachelor's degrees.

I emphasize higher learning. Now if lecturers who can't teach, tech, then students learning will be impeded. Which is really a bureaucracy. Perhaps this should be changed to "An insitution for RESEARCH, with learning an afterthought and fueled by bureaucracy and business driven purposes".

Sad sad sad...