&gt; 2) I always thought many STEM professors were useless educators who only taught students as a by-the-way while they chased fame&#x2F;recognition among their peers for academic-success (or status).<p>Well, you forgot Research Dollars. It&#x27;s an open secret that STEM undergraduate education is seen as a departmental obligation, and that your goals, and what you were hired to do is produce new research. Best case scenario you use classes to filter and train people to perform your wage slave researcher staff. Realistically, STEM is moving towards a Lecturer &#x2F; Researcher model, though faculty unions, senates, and ethics panels have opinions on the matter.<p>In contrast, instead of research dollars subsidizing undergraduate education, math departments generally are set up to use education to subsidize research. Fortunately mathematician&#x27;s needs are typically quite modest. But when cheaper Lecturers are introduced to the department, it&#x27;s clear that the department could be cut.<p>&gt; As many others are saying, it would be better for this guy to leave, because if the department was overtly toxic before, the true assholism will shine once the other profs create a siege mentality against this guy for &quot;outing them&quot;.<p>Realistically, it sounds like they&#x27;re already in siege mentality. The picture he paints is that hiring an adjunct was controversial <i>within the department</i> because it represents a shift away from research, especially if he can improve on outcomes despite larger class size. Several tenure track faculty lines could feasibly be cut as a result of decreased need for teaching.<p>His best case scenario would have been for the information in that open letter to reach the hands of the people in power pushing for more Lecturers (and less tenure track faculty lines), before he was fired.