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<p>I think your personal insults are uncalled for, hawkette, but that’s not my main concern. I feel compelled to defend my colleagues. Every academic I know—to a person—devotes a great deal of time and energy to teaching, and except in graduate-level-only professional schools (law, medicine, etc.) they devote just as much care and attention to teaching undergraduates as to graduate students. Nor is their research solely for “personal and institutional benefit,” as you so crassly put it. People become academics because of their love for learning, and for the thrill of discovery and the challenge of pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. Those who are good at it become renowned academics within their respective disciplines. The fruits of their research are a benefit not only to themselves and their institutions but to the nation and to all of humanity. It is also a direct benefit to their students. That love of learning can be infectious. It can inspire students not only to soar academically as undergraduates, far beyond the pedestrian plodding through a watered-down second-hand rehash of the basics of a field that passes for “education” at far too many places; but it can also inspire in them a lifelong love for learning and develop in them a set of intellectual tools that will let them “learn how to learn”—the most important thing anyone can learn in college. And those are things that will help them in any walk of life. But they are also things that come from first-hand engagement with the outer boundaries of the discipline, not from the watered-down rehash of the basics, however entertainingly that rehash is packaged.</p>