Now research programs are another matter. I've always found this dual role of university to be very strange. Why force professors who are excellent researchers to teach undergrad classes, when they might not be particularly suited to do that? Why sideline excellent lecturers who does not have the experience to be at the top of their field yet? It seems to me that research should be research, and teaching should be teaching.
I like your way of thinking. Unfortunately, money talks even in academia. Professors with research programs have to pay "tax" to the school, in the form of "indirect cost". When a professor gets a grant, he/she will have to leave 20%-40% of that grant to the school. A professor at a decent school should get ~$750,000 external funding annually. Of course, this is biology/medicine programs. Physical science or engineering program can't get that much. Anyway, he/she have to pay the school, on average 30% of this funding. So if a department has 30 faculty members, that means the school will get about $6.75 million annually just from this department. So literally, professors are making money for the school. On the other hand, the value of lecturers cannot be measured by any parameter since they don't publish papers and don't obtain any funding. So their value is less obvious. Particularly, since they don't actually bring in any extra money, they are typically viewed as less valuable. So lecturers are typically marginalized.
So to answer your question "why can't they let the professors do research and let the lecturers teach?" Well, professors serve two functions to the school: 1) publish papers and get funding so that school will get loads of money; 2) their reputation as experts in their respective field will attract high-quality students, high SAT scores, better ranking and ultimately more money (in the form of donations and endowments). So if they only have to stay in their labs and do research, there would be little chance that any student will be able to interact with them and learn from the best. Then why would any student come to this school? You don't come to a college because it has excellent lecturers who teach excellent classes. Many high school teachers can do that too in AP classes and probably can do a better job. You come to a school because it has world-leading experts and feel that you might be able to learn something from the best and will ultimately benefit you. So these experts will have to teach, no matter how much they don't want to.
This actually brings up another point. Why don't researchers want to teach? It has everything to do with the academic system. Teaching is a major source of stress. WHY? Well, excellent teaching won't get you any real credit. Yes, you can win all kinds of teaching awards, but it means absolutely NOTHING in time of tenure review/promotion. It is still the hard-core stuff, like publication and funding, that measures your level of success in academia. However, bad teaching will hurt you badly. If you get many teaching complaints, you better prepare to defend yourself in tenure review. Unlike any other job where no promotion means simply you stay where you are, no tenure in academia means no job at all. If you can't obtain tenure 5-6 years into your professorship, you will have to pack up and leave. Plain and simply. So this is not simply an ambition issue (you want to be promoted, etc...), but whether you can still have a job and a roof over your head and food on your table!! So lots of pressure. So from the moment we begin, we have one and only one goal: tenure! Anything that distracts us from that goal will be viewed as, obviously, negative. So you can see why teaching can be a source of stress for a professor. If we LOVE teaching and want to dedicate more time to it, that means we are diverting valuable time and energy away from research, which will, no doubt, hurt us. If we don't do a good job teaching, we will get complaints and that will hurt us as well. So no matter what we do, teaching will hurt us. Bad situation... And stress
To put it into perspective, a student who graduated from Qinghua will almost certainly do extraordinarily well in any top rank US university. To enter universities like Qinghua, a person has to be highly competitive and determined.
No doubt about that! Chinese universities produce excellent students.
Chinese education, from very early on, focuses too much on results and not enough on the process. Chinese parents ask what grade you got in your test, not what you learned in the class. Teachers and schools get "incentives" if they can raise the test grades of their class. You can only get higher education if you can pass an exam. This mentality of results over process is drilled into Chinese students, and that is probably the biggest problem facing academic research in China right now.
Agreed. Many Chinese postdocs I've met over the years tend to get nervous when they can't get the kind of positive results that their professors want. I am always puzzled by this. A result is a result. No one expects your professor to be 100% right all the time. Why get nervous about getting different result? Its not your fault. If anyone is at fault when a prediction is different from experimental data, it's the prediction! In my opinion, the moment you show your boss is wrong is the moment he/she will see you as a fellow colleague, instead of a subordinate/technician. Yet, many Chinese students/postdocs seem to be more comfortable with the role of a subordinate. I think it has a lot to do with how they have been trained as students. They have been measured by how well they can answer test questions correctly. To them, there is always a correct answer and this answer has always been aligned with the teacher. So they have to agree with the teacher.
