Teaching and research should be decoupled. Professors are hired and granted tenure primarily based on their ability to produce original research. The skillsets are different; often good researchers are bad teachers, and good teachers are bad researchers.

My experience at a research university, albeit 12 years ago, was that many of my professors loathed teaching. Some openly expressed disdain for the time they wasted teaching when they could be researching. I think a better framework in the future would be to have researchers, and lecturers/teaching professors separate. One is to teach, the other is to research.

Teaching an undergraduate class or even a graduate class is still teaching. The author does not say he won't do that anymore.

The problem is about the fresh talent pipeline for researchers (i.e. PhDs). In many ways, elementary school and a Master's degree are more alike than a Master's and a PhD in the sense that you're learning prior art with clearly defined exam/project assessments and no expectation of making something truly novel in both elementary school and the Master's, while a PhD is all about discovering something nobody uncovered before. So, calling this a problem of not wanting to teach isn't quite right.

IMO, the article is rather highlighting a different problem; the former problem in this area was that only a tiny sliver of the best engineering/CS undergrads wanted go into research given the far more lucrative industry careers, and now the supply part of that market is about to vanish too due to agentic AI. This will basically kill the concept of an academic career as we know it and the point of the article is that we need to find a different model of advancing and funding science.

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