Acidus quoted:

The course instructor was a legendarily incompetent teacher, even by the dubious standards of Smartypants U's engineering department. He was so incoherent and capricious that academic advisors were warned to steer students away from his courses. So why was he kept on staff? His research was outstanding. My tuition dollars at work.

This hit a small hobby horse of mine -- tuition dollars. University tuition, especially at a private engineering university, is an enormous cost from the perspective of the student. But mostly from the prospective of a student, at a reasonable private engineering university.

For example, we learn from the 2003 CMU annual report that net tuition and fees represent 34% of the operating revenue. We see a similar story from Georgia Tech. For CMU, 42% of revenue comes from "Sponsored Research"; for GATech, almost 5x the tuition revenue is "Gifts, Grants and Contracts".

You say his research is outstanding? Guess how he, and the University, get paid. The question is not "why was he kept on staff" (even if we ignore Tenure), but perhaps "why was he kept teaching undergraduates". There are faculty here who don't interact with lower-level students very often, but who are definately profit-centers for the University.

RE: Confessions of an Engineering Washout