The other week, I met a nice guy while we were traveling up north. As our kids were busy trying to wrestle one another off a dock, we fell into one of those long summer conversations. He was a professor of engineering at Northeastern University in Boston. I got the impression he thought I sold roofing supplies or some such. Anyway, he got to telling me about his job.

At some point, he told me he taught a “one-one” load, or one class each fall and one each spring.

“You know,” he added, “that feels like just the right amount of teaching. I get to engage with our students, but it’s not overwhelming.” His wife chimed in to reassure me that, while one course a semester might not sound like a lot, he works really hard. She explained that as a full professor with a major administrative role, he has to devote a big chunk of time to chasing grants and doing research.

I nodded and asked if he was involved in Northeastern’s famed undergrad co-op program, with its extensive apprenticeships and faculty mentoring. He shrugged and said he doesn’t really have anything to do with that program, that a separate staff coordinates and mentors those students.

Now, look, I liked the guy. I’ll assume he really is working hard. He didn’t strike me as someone trying to game the system. And yet I found myself wondering how we’ve wound up with this inane system. I mean, Northeastern is, what, the seventh-best research institution in metro Boston? (Off the top of my head, I’d say it trails MIT, Harvard, BU, BC, Tufts, and Brandeis.) Let me be clear—that’s not intended as a knock on Northeastern, given that I think higher ed’s excessive fixation on published research is misguided.

Rather, my point is here we have a highly trained, accomplished, personable guy at a school that’s far better known for its instruction than for its research . . . and yet he barely teaches, nor does he seem to be doing much mentoring or advising. (I’d assume the school’s acclaimed co-op program is placing some number of students in engineering-related jobs, but I could be wrong.) This strikes me as a nutty approach to higher education.

If you want to argue that elite scholars at research universities should be focused on grant-funded research, I’m very sympathetic. I get the argument that teaching loads at the nation’s top 40 or 50 research universities might feature a lot of one-ones for pioneering scholars who are pushing the frontiers of knowledge. But this isn’t that.

This is about the larger political economy of higher education. As Richard Keck and I documented a few months ago, the norm across much of higher education is for faculty to spend most of their time on activities other than teaching. Even at second- and third-tier institutions, faculty are mostly found shuffling papers, sitting in meetings, chasing grants, and publishing trivial, never-read papers in one of the 24,000 barely read journals. This is a story of warped expectations, incentives, and academic culture—one with unfortunate implications for the quality and cost of undergraduate education.

In his terrific book on college teaching, University of Pennsylvania historian Jonathan Zimmerman drily notes that faculty tend to characterize “research as their ‘work’ and teaching as their ‘load’”—a habit that, he observes, speaks “volumes about academic priorities.” Generally, faculty aren’t hired, recognized, or promoted for their teaching. Instead, more and more instruction is off-loaded to an itinerant army of adjuncts and graduate students, few of whom have the incentive or opportunity to maintain rigorous standards or mentor their charges.

Higher education’s apathy about teaching is pretty remarkable. For a sector that assiduously tracks data on enrollment, public spending, faculty positions, and faculty salaries, there’s a remarkable degree of disinterest in what its professors actually do. The University of Delaware administers the annual National Study of Instructional Costs and Productivity, surveying faculty and teaching assistants about course loads and enrollment—but the data are only available to officials at four-year, non-profit colleges. Did I mention the study is being discontinued? Oh, and the existing data are being taken down this December.

The U.S. Department of Education used to track faculty workloads through the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF) but stopped doing so in 2004. Last year, a search for the terms “faculty teaching loads,” “college course load,” “teaching load,” “professor course load,” “professor schedule,” and “faculty load,” yielded zero results on the sites for organizations including the Institute for Higher Education Policy; the Association for the Study of Higher Education; the Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research; the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

While there’s a dearth of good data, the available evidence suggests the de-emphasis on teaching stretches beyond the one-quarter of higher education institutions that bill themselves as research-oriented. As Colorado State University’s Kimberly French and several colleagues have observed, “Even within teaching-oriented institutions, faculty are increasingly research productive, in an effort to generate funds and emulate the professional status awarded to their colleagues in research universities.” One of the few studies to examine faculty work, carried out by Joya Misra and three colleagues, found that tenure-track faculty reported spending just 27 percent to 35 percent of their working hours on instructional tasks.

At far too many institutions today, teaching just isn’t what colleges prioritize or reward, with unfortunate consequences for student learning and campus culture. It’s an astonishing development that is too rarely mentioned. After all, in the American colonies, the earliest colleges were institutions committed to training ministers, lawyers, and physicians. Harvard, Yale, William & Mary, and their imitators were, first and foremost, places of teaching and learning. The royal charter for King’s College (now Columbia University) called for “Instruction and Education of Youth in the Learned Languages, and Liberal Arts and Sciences.” Over time, this mission extended to new subjects and vocations, especially agriculture and mechanics.

Yet, as the 20th century loomed, the German model of a research university offered a more ambitious, prestigious vision of higher education. New American schools like Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago began to prioritize research over teaching. Initially, this was a healthy evolution at a select number of institutions. Eventually, however, fascination with the trappings of research—fueled by hundreds of billions in federal funding—derailed broad swaths of higher education in unanticipated ways.

By the 1960s, Sandy Jencks and David Riesman could observe in The Academic Revolution that, given “a limited amount of time and energy,” professors had learned that their “professional standing and personal advancement” were significantly better served by a focus on “research than [on] teaching.” More than half a century later, the leaders of four-year institutions still pay lip service to teaching, learning, and faculty-student engagement. After all, that’s how legislators, taxpayers, and the broader public understand the mission of higher education. But, in truth, teaching and mentoring are too often a secondary concern.

Now, back in the mid-20th century, institutional routines and structures undergirded education in four-year colleges. Core curricula, traditional disciplines, tough grading practices, strict codes of conduct, and a commitment to the classics created an academic culture with a strong gravitational pull toward teaching and rigor. Students went to class, read books, wrote papers, and were expected to work hard. In the years since, that scaffolding has come apart. Core curricula gave way to a la carte course menus. Traditional disciplines were elbowed aside by a raft of identity-driven programs. Grade inflation soared. Norms eroded, and the classics were largely jettisoned. The result is an academic culture less defined by gravity and more by aimlessness.

We need to do better, and it starts by overhauling expectations for faculty. Some will inevitably read such talk as an attack on professors, given the ongoing tumult in higher education. But this isn’t about point-scoring or assigning individual culpability; it’s about misaligned priorities. Indeed, I suspect there are plenty of faculty who’d welcome a respite from adminis-trivia and the publication paper chase and be delighted to devote more time to teaching—if they were confident that doing so would be rewarded and other demands really would be lessened. For any institution willing to realign its priorities, there’s a win-win lurking for students and scholars alike.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”