I think ideally academia needs to evolve to be open to everyone and worshiping of nobody. Pop in to publish your article, return to whatever else you had been doing after. Repeat. University professors are rarely that innovative or good in their teaching methods, so that part could be to be taken up by teaching faculty instead.
Pop in to publish your article, return to whatever else you had been doing after.
Nothing is stopping you. I've published papers and presented at academic conferences while working in industry. Both in collaboration with academics and without.
Well over half of college teaching is already done by "adjuncts" who are non tenure track teaching staff. The teachers are effectively unsupervised and do their best but have no incentive to improve other than self motivation.
Disclosure: I was an adjunct for a semester while I was between industry jobs.
The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability. One of the best lecturers I had at university was a postdoc who didn't get hired and ended up teaching at a 'third rate' university. One of the worst lecturers I had got head hunted by MIT.
>The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability.
Because they aren't intended to be educational. Universities (as they are run today) are primarily grant-revenue capture organizations, secondarily research organizations (at least to the degree necessary that grant money doesn't dry up because of fraudulent spending accusations), and finally after that, a begrudged effort is made at education for optics. If they could ditch the education angle entirely, they'd send the students home tomorrow.
That's not necessarily a problem. There are different options in the marketplace. If you attend an R1 research university then of course hiring decisions will heavily weight research productivity. But many other smaller schools absolutely do look at teaching ability.
