<p>CPT- two fairly recent undergrads in my family, both graduates of big research U’s, neither were “academic superstars” at their institution if you count Phi Beta Kappa or Rhodes/Fulbright, etc. Both had high quality research experience, being directly supervised and taught by “very famous people”, i.e. Xiggi’s fat cat types who don’t interact with undergrads. Not just office hours (hey, that’s required by most universities). Talking “drop in when you hit a roadblock” or “let me know if you want to have lunch next week” type of availability. Yes- the grad students are there to teach very basic concepts (a statistical program, or to de-bug a problem with a computer application). But the VERY FAMOUS professors were the ones guiding the undergrads, helping them define a chunk of the problem that they wanted to tackle, being mentors in every conceivable way (and if you want to fault them for not taking hours a week to teach a programming language to my kid who was not a Comp Sci or Stats major, then the criticism stands- yes, professor was too big and important and he assigned a grad student to do it.)</p>
<p>The problem of adjuncts was not created by the “famous faculty”. Why the animosity?</p>