Question: **tl;dr**

Faculty don't think teaching is as important as their other responsibilities; how do we change that?

**Long version**

I've been working in academia for a long time and whenever I see instructors half-assing their teaching the go to excuses are that they have no time, or that it doesn't get any respect/grants/promotion/tenure/etc. I don't doubt they're busy, and I know departments don't typically reward teaching excellence (or punish teaching mediocrity...) but the students are suffering as a result.

How can we (faculty that care about teaching and staff supporting faculty) change this situation? What can we do short-term to make faculty care about teaching *now* and what can we do long-term to make departments care about excellence in teaching, and not just in research?

*Note:* I'm aware research brings in money. Keep in mind most faculty are adjuncts who aren't doing research but still have tenured research faculty that don't care about teaching as their role models.

Answer: 
The fundamental problem is that research and teaching are two *entirely* different skills. Imagine you're hiring a chef who is also expected to spend a third of his or her time waiting tables; the simple fact of reality is that specially talented individuals will rarely excel at both of these tasks. 

You can't *convince* a professor to be a better teacher than they are - most simply do not have the personality type, passion, inclination, or even inherent capacity to be excellent teachers. They haven't trained those skills nor have they required them to get to their current position in life. It isn't what they were hired for, it isn't what they are good at, and it isn't what they have spent their lives wanting and learning to do. Professors are hired to perform and manage research activities and are only incidentally required to also perform *custodial* teaching duties. They would likely also do a terrible job if you required them to pitch in cooking lunch in the cafeteria twice a week.

At least in my part of the world, secondary school teachers are not even allowed to apply for a job without an appropriate degree in education. This is to say that, in addition to having the required qualifications in the subject that they are teaching they are also required to be qualified *teachers*. I see higher education eventually following a similar model - as teaching becomes more important, professorship *must* eventually branch into two or three largely separate streams.

With specialization being so critical in almost every other professional activity it is almost unbelievable that professorship is such a haphazard occupation. While the training and demonstrated excellence for the position is almost entirely based on research and scientific acumen, professors are nevertheless required to also perform at least two entirely different functions - teaching and management. Surely some PhDs would love to only teach while others would love to devote entirely to research. Likewise, how many late-career professors could continue to produce invaluable research if not burdened by the need to both teach and project-manage a large research group; the very skill they excel at is squandered while their time is occupied performing things they are often neither good at nor that they enjoy. 

If you want good teachers, hire teachers to teach. If you want good researchers, hire researchers to research. If you want well managed research groups, hire managers to manage them. If you want chaos and headaches, pick some clever boffins and get them to juggle it all at once. Occasionally you will get lucky and find professors who are excellent researchers, excellent teachers, and excellent managers but, in my experience, these are very rare creatures indeed. Higher education would do well to reconsider its organizational hierarchy, I think.
In a nutshell: **Competition** between departments
for students and funding
can be one of the important reasons
to cause departments to care about the quality of teaching.

I give the following anecdote to illustrate the above principle.

In my undergrad institution,
which is outside the US and is fairly large (~30 K undergrads),
the introductory math classes taken by engineering students
were taught by professors in the math department.

I had heard from people in the math department that
some in the engineering department
wanted to teach the classes themselves,
so as to gain more funding and be able to hire more headcount (faculty).
Because the math department did not want to
lose this funding and headcount to the engineering department
they sent their best teaching professors to teach the intro math courses.
This allowed the math department to defend their position and say,
"We're doing a good job teaching this course,
as evidenced by good teaching evaluations,
so why should you rock the boat?"