I’d also add to this that the quality standards in academia are generally piss poor, and my own type A perfectionism was a big reason why I did not follow in my advisor’s footsteps after finishing grad school: I saw that he rose to fame and rank by essentially creating low-quality demoware to be pleasing to the eye at conferences, and had zero ambition to work on results or problems important to the field.
Professors are not self-selected for any notion of quality at all. Some of them happen to focus on quality, some of them on politics, etc., just like anything else.
In many companies, being promoted to senior levels of engineering is a far more meaningful mark of quality effectiveness than post-graduate degrees or research publications.
Regardless of any of this, treating students with respect, working with them to define their work based on their career goals, and respecting a healthy standard work/life balance is a basic requirement of professionalism.
By this notion, a lot of professors are not professionals in their field, rather just compulsive amateurs.
I think this really depends on the field. In mathematics, my field, you can argue that the work of various people is undervalued, but it's a bit harder to argue that certain theorems are overvalued. However, the metrics of evaluation for theorems are quite different than those for... 'demoware'...?
Professors are not self-selected for any notion of quality at all. Some of them happen to focus on quality, some of them on politics, etc., just like anything else.
In many companies, being promoted to senior levels of engineering is a far more meaningful mark of quality effectiveness than post-graduate degrees or research publications.
Regardless of any of this, treating students with respect, working with them to define their work based on their career goals, and respecting a healthy standard work/life balance is a basic requirement of professionalism.
By this notion, a lot of professors are not professionals in their field, rather just compulsive amateurs.