I had a conversation with some students recently about the changing face of the engineering faculty here at UL Lafayette. As we shift to doing more (and better) research, we will have fewer professors dedicated solely to teaching. I'll leave the discussion of the necessity of this shift for another post, but the students seemed to think that it was a bad thing for them.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I completely disagree with this position. Even ignoring the financial effects of having an active and well-funded research program,1 having research active faculty can be of great benefit. The article linked below does a great job setting up the case for why.
An Engineering Career: Only a Young Person’s Game? — IEEE Spectrum
One of the main discussion points in the article is the "half-life of knowledge":
An engineer’s “half-life of knowledge,” an expression coined in 1962 by economist Fritz Machlup to describe the time it takes for half the knowledge in a particular domain to be superseded, ...
In other words, if you are not continuously learning, pretty soon your knowledge will be obsolete. All evidence suggests that the time it takes for this to happen has decreased dramatically in recent years. This is a trap that having research active faculty avoids2; we have to be continuously learning and keeping pace with the state-of-the-art. The new knowledge we develop gets passed directly into our classes, benefitting students.
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It's not a coincidence that the schools with the best computer and laboratory facilities are also the most research-active. ↩
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Of course teaching faculty could also be learning and improving their knowledge in their fields, and the best teachers do. I'm making the argument that research active faculty have to do this. ↩