Professors, Publishing, and Teaching

One of the great mythologies at public universities, especially, is that students benefit from taking courses from scholars who are involved on the cutting edge of their fields.  I can't speak to the sciences, and I think there is much merit to this argument when one is talking about graduate students, perhaps even majors who are headed off to graduate school in that particular subject.  But I have become convinced that the greatest service that most professors could provide for the general public, let alone their students, would be to focus on their teaching.

The problem with researching scholarly articles and books is that they take a great deal of time.  So does excellent teaching.  The best teachers at universities I know are always reading or re-reading in the fields they teach in and actively seek out new technologies or practices or readings.  They have a relentless desire to figure out what it is that their students should be learning and how to help them to learn it.  They also think about how to spend more time with students, from requiring them to come in for one-to-one attention, coming to class early or staying late to hang out, even calling them at home.  This adds up to a lot of time--leaving little for researching and writing the specialized scholarship that bring raises, promotions, and status.

It also seems to me that the sort of research that universities most esteem, original research, is much less useful for teaching than more synthetic or "popular" articles or books are.  My first two books were specialized monographs that consumed many years of research in scattered archives.  I occasionally use that research in my teaching.  But I am constantly drawing upon the research I did for three books that took much less time and no travel to research, general overviews of Oregon, nature loving in the western world, and the U.S. family, books that in fact largely flowed from (and were tailored for) my teaching.

Of course the field of history, like any discipline, needs scholars who focus on researching and writing materials that are not intended for a broader audience.  But do not the students who are paying more and more and more tuition money deserve to be taught by professors who are primarily devoted to their education?