Picture a lecture hall. Two hundred students. A professor at the front. This professor is a genuine expert. Published extensively. Cited globally. One of the leading minds in their field. The university is proud to have them.
The professor opens their slides. They start talking. Within ten minutes, half the room is lost. The explanation assumes knowledge the students don't have. The pace is wrong. The examples don't land. The professor isn't looking at the students. They're looking at the slides, almost talking to themselves, reciting what they know without checking if anyone is following.
By the end of the hour, most students have mentally checked out. Some are on their phones. Some are staring blankly. A few diligent ones are copying down words they don't understand, hoping it will make sense later when they teach themselves from the textbook.
The professor finishes. The students leave. Nobody learned much. The lecture fulfilled its administrative function. It did not fulfil its educational purpose.
This happens every day, in universities across the country and around the world. Brilliant researchers standing in front of students, failing to teach them. Not because they're bad people. Not because they don't care. Because research ability and teaching ability are completely different skills, and universities keep pretending they're the same thing.
You Hired Them for Research
Let's be honest about how academics get hired.
When a university fills a position, what do they look for? Publications. A strong research record. Citations. Grants secured. Conference presentations. A PhD from a respected institution. Expertise in a specific field. Potential to enhance the department's research profile.
Teaching ability? Maybe mentioned. Rarely assessed seriously. Candidates might give a sample lecture. But the hiring committee is mostly evaluating their research presentation, not their pedagogical skill. The assumption is that anyone smart enough to do good research can figure out how to teach.
This assumption is wrong. But it drives hiring decisions everywhere.
The result is predictable. Universities fill their faculties with researchers. Some of those researchers happen to be good teachers. Many are mediocre. Some are genuinely bad. But they all end up in front of students, because teaching is part of the job, whether or not they can actually do it.
The university got what it hired for: research output. The students got whatever teaching ability came along accidentally.
Research and Teaching Are Different Skills
Let's be specific about why expertise doesn't equal teaching ability.
Research requires deep, narrow focus. You spend years mastering a tiny slice of human knowledge. You learn to think like other experts in your field. You develop specialised vocabulary. You operate at the frontier where everything is uncertain and contested.
Teaching requires the opposite. You need to zoom out. You need to remember what it's like to not know something. You need to translate complex ideas into accessible language. You need to build bridges from where students are to where they need to be.
A great researcher has moved so far beyond the basics that the basics feel trivial, obvious, not worth explaining. But those basics are exactly what students need. The expert's curse is forgetting that their foundational knowledge was once hard to acquire.
Research is solitary and self-directed. You work alone or in small teams, setting your own problems, following your own interests. Teaching is interactive and responsive. You work with a room full of people who have different starting points, different learning styles, different needs. You have to read them, adjust, respond in real time.
Research success is measured by peer recognition. Other experts evaluate your work. Teaching success is measured by student outcomes. People who don't yet understand evaluate whether you helped them understand. The audiences are completely different.
Research rewards complexity. A paper that reveals new layers of nuance is a good paper. Teaching rewards clarity. A lecture that reveals new layers of nuance when students haven't grasped the basics is a bad lecture.
These are not just different tasks. They require different cognitive skills, different interpersonal abilities, different orientations to knowledge itself. Being brilliant at one provides no guarantee of competence at the other.
The Incentive Problem
Even when researchers could develop teaching skills, the system discourages it.
How do academics get promoted? Research output. Publications, grants, citations. How do academics build reputation? Research output. Conferences, collaborations, impact factors. How do academics get job offers from other universities? Research output. Nobody gets poached for their teaching.
Teaching is a requirement, not a reward. It's something you have to do, not something that advances your career. The incentive is to minimise teaching obligations and maximise research time. To treat lectures as an interruption from the real work.
This creates a culture where teaching is devalued. Where admitting you care about teaching feels like admitting you're not serious about research. Where investing time in becoming a better teacher feels like a career mistake.
Some academics love teaching despite the incentives. They find it rewarding. They're good at it. They invest time anyway. But they're swimming against the current. The system doesn't reward them. Their colleagues who publish more will be promoted faster.
Meanwhile, the academics who are bad at teaching face no consequences. Students complain. Course evaluations are poor. Nothing happens. As long as the research output continues, the teaching failure is tolerated.
Universities say they value teaching. They put it in mission statements. They create teaching awards. But when it comes to hiring, promotion, and prestige, research dominates. Everyone in academia knows this. The incentives speak louder than the slogans.
What Students Actually Experience
Let's talk about what this looks like from the student's side.
You're sitting in a lecture. The professor is clearly intelligent. They know the material deeply. But they can't explain it. They use jargon without defining it. They skip steps that seem obvious to them but aren't obvious to you. They don't look at the room to see if people are following. They get annoyed when students ask basic questions.
You leave confused. You go to the textbook, which is dense and assumes prior knowledge you don't have. You search online, where you find explanations from other countries that use different terminology. You ask classmates, who are equally lost. Eventually you piece something together, or you don't.
The next lecture, the professor has moved on. You're behind now. The gap widens.
Or maybe the professor isn't bad at explaining, they're just disengaged. They resent being there. Teaching takes time from their research. They do the minimum. Slides from five years ago. No updates. No enthusiasm. No sense that this matters to them.
Students can tell when a lecturer doesn't want to be there. It's demoralising. Why should they care about learning if the teacher doesn't care about teaching?
Some students adapt. They learn to teach themselves. They find resources. They form study groups. They survive despite the teaching, not because of it. These students might even thrive.
But many don't. They struggle. They disengage. They conclude they're not smart enough, when actually they just weren't taught well. They pass or fail based partly on whether they happened to get lecturers who could actually teach.
This is a lottery no student signed up for. They enrolled expecting education. They got variable teaching quality distributed essentially at random.
The "They'll Figure It Out" Myth
Universities operate on an unspoken assumption: smart people can teach. If you understand something deeply, you can explain it. Pedagogy isn't really a skill, it's just knowing the material and standing in front of people.
This is demonstrably false. Teaching is a skill. Like any skill, some people have natural aptitude, most can improve with training, and some will never be good at it regardless of effort.
The evidence is everywhere. Walk into any university and compare lectures across the same course taught by different people. Same content. Wildly different outcomes. Same students learning dramatically different amounts depending on who's at the front of the room.
The difference isn't content knowledge. The difference is pedagogical skill. The ability to organise information for novices. To anticipate confusion. To explain the same idea multiple ways. To check for understanding. To adjust based on feedback. To make learning feel achievable rather than overwhelming.
These skills can be taught. There's a whole field dedicated to it. But universities rarely require academics to learn them. New lecturers might get a one-day orientation. Maybe a teaching mentor. Then they're on their own, expected to figure it out through trial and error, with students as the test subjects.
Meanwhile, primary and high school teachers undergo years of training in pedagogy. They're assessed on teaching ability before they're allowed in classrooms. They receive ongoing professional development. They're observed and supported.
University lecturers? Here's the material, here's the room, good luck.
The Cost to Students
This isn't an abstract problem. It has real consequences for student outcomes.
Students who experience poor teaching learn less. They take longer to grasp concepts. They develop gaps in understanding that compound over time. They might pass courses without really understanding the fundamentals, setting themselves up for failure in advanced courses that build on those foundations.
Poor teaching increases dropout rates. Students who consistently struggle to understand lectures, who feel lost and unsupported, who conclude they're not capable, leave. Not all of them should have stayed. But some were perfectly capable. They just needed better teaching.
Poor teaching wastes money. Students pay tuition for education. When the teaching is ineffective, they're paying for something they're not receiving. They're essentially funding the research activities of academics who view teaching as an inconvenient obligation.
Poor teaching damages confidence. When capable students struggle because they're being taught poorly, they internalise it as personal failure. They conclude they're not smart enough, not cut out for university, not capable of academic work. This belief can shape their entire future trajectory.
And poor teaching produces graduates with weaker knowledge. They might have the degree, but they don't have the depth of understanding they should. This shows when they enter the workforce, when they pursue further study, when they try to apply what they supposedly learned.
What Good Teaching Actually Requires
Let's be concrete about what makes someone a good teacher at university level.
They can explain complex ideas simply. Not by dumbing down, but by building up. They start where students are. They connect new information to existing knowledge. They use analogies and examples that make sense to novices, not just experts.
They check for understanding constantly. They don't just lecture. They ask questions. They watch for confusion. They adjust their pace and approach based on how students are responding. They create feedback loops.
They're prepared. Their lectures are structured. They have clear objectives. They've thought about common misconceptions. They've anticipated where students will struggle. Their materials are up to date.
They care about student success. They're available. They respond to emails. They hold office hours. They provide constructive feedback. They want students to learn, and that desire is visible.
They can translate expertise. They remember what it was like to not know this material. They can zoom out from expert perspective to novice perspective. They can make the implicit explicit.
They engage with pedagogy. They think about how people learn. They try different approaches. They seek feedback and improve. They treat teaching as a skill worth developing, not just a requirement to tolerate.
These abilities are independent of research brilliance. A Nobel laureate might have none of them. A junior lecturer with a modest publication record might have all of them. They're different competencies.
The Solutions Universities Avoid
This problem is solvable. Universities just don't want to solve it.
Hire some people specifically to teach. Not everyone needs to do research. Some academics could be hired purely on teaching ability, given reasonable workloads, and rewarded for doing it well. This would immediately improve teaching quality.
Make teaching ability matter in hiring. Require demonstration of teaching competence. Assess it seriously. Don't hire brilliant researchers who can't teach unless you're willing to keep them out of classrooms.
Train academics in pedagogy. Require meaningful training before they teach. Provide ongoing professional development. Create cultures of teaching excellence within departments.
Reward good teaching. Make it count toward promotion. Give teaching awards that carry prestige and resources. Create career pathways for academics who excel at teaching even if their research output is modest.
Hold poor teachers accountable. If someone consistently gets terrible evaluations, if students are learning nothing, if feedback is unanimous that they can't teach, address it. Provide support. If they don't improve, remove them from teaching responsibilities.
Create teaching specialists within departments. Some academics love teaching and are good at it. Let them teach more. Give them resources to develop better materials. Let them mentor others. Build institutional knowledge about what works.
None of this is mysterious. It's standard practice in high-performing organisations. Universities just haven't applied it to teaching because research prestige matters more than student outcomes.
Why This Won't Change
Here's the uncomfortable truth: universities benefit from the current system.
Research brings prestige. Rankings are based on research output. Reputation comes from research. Funding flows to research. The academics who drive these things are researchers, not teachers.
Teaching is a cost centre. It doesn't generate revenue beyond tuition, which is mostly fixed. Investing in teaching quality doesn't increase the university's ranking or prestige. It just costs money.
Students will keep coming regardless. Poor teaching creates unhappy students, but they still enrol, still pay fees, still graduate. There's no market mechanism forcing improvement.
Researchers have the power. Faculty governance means researchers decide priorities. They're not going to vote to devalue research in favour of teaching. That would hurt them personally.
The system is self-perpetuating. The academics who succeeded in the current system don't see the problem. They learned despite poor teaching. They assume current students should do the same. Empathy for struggling students is limited.
So nothing changes. Universities keep hiring for research, expecting teaching, and hoping students figure it out. They keep promoting researchers regardless of teaching ability. They keep treating pedagogical skill as irrelevant.
And students keep experiencing variable teaching quality, learning less than they could, struggling unnecessarily, and concluding that this is just how university is.
What Students Deserve
Students pay tuition for education. They deserve to be taught by people who can actually teach.
Not just experts who stand at the front and talk. Teachers. People who understand how learning works. Who can explain clearly. Who check for understanding. Who care whether students succeed.
This shouldn't be controversial. It should be baseline expectation. If you're employed to teach, you should be capable of teaching. If you're not, you shouldn't be in that role.
But universities have built a system where teaching competence is optional. Where research brilliance excuses teaching failure. Where students are expected to educate themselves while paying for education.
This serves the institution's prestige. It serves researchers' career interests. It doesn't serve students. And until universities face real consequences for poor teaching, it won't change.
Students deserve better. They're paying for education. They should receive it.