Teaching Below Research? Really?

Before I come to what triggered this post, here's something that I think needs to be said out aloud: The recent trend of hiring separate people for teaching, research and administration in universities is fundamentally incorrect. We increasingly have people who call themselves professors but want to escape teaching (why be at a university if you don't enjoy professing your subject?) - and at least 80% of the folks I have met in this set are busy drilling holes in such thin parts of the plate that it's embarrassing to call their "research" research; others who are either intellectually so damn lazy or "uncurious" that they neither wish to engage with open problems in their field nor invent or build something new but just content themselves with lecturing (that Dr. in front of your name ought to mean something!) or have been so dismayed by this "publish or perish" madness that they've resigned themselves to a teaching heavy career instead of living the healthy teaching-research-balanced academic dream that inspired them in the first place; and then there is of course a plethora of administrators today (at least in India) who have neither been good teachers nor researchers but their assumed enlightenment results in policy after policy that's setting fire to the temple with such rapidity that it will all burn down if something doesn't shift soon. It is beyond me, and beyond every sound academic I know, that we have forsaken the right thing to do: which is to simply expect excellence in all three - teaching, research and service - from all university professors.

But even with the above said, one still assumes that universities will keep some balance, some reasonableness. Thus this trigger:

I found out to my utter shock some months ago that Educator Track or Teaching Track faculty members in US universities are considered a notch below (and are paid lesser) than "normal" faculty members.

This is a completely incorrect movement of things! Universities are established first and foremost to educate, to enlighten, then anything else. That's the very raison d'etre of their existence.

We cannot allow such hierarchies to set in in our universities. Educator Track / Teaching Track faculty, who handle a higher teaching load in lieu of bringing grants, have to be considered exactly at the same level as "research faculty". That's the right value system to adhere to in educational institutions!

To all my colleagues out there who still believe in the academic ideal, who are still inspired by the possibilities a vibrant classroom offers: Teach your hearts out! You're doing great! Love those students! They know it when a professor is for real! And there are still enough of us who are challenging the present downward spiral academia is on for hope to be lost.