Unless they go out of their way to pursue it, university professors receive no training whatsoever in teaching, management, or general social skills.
Even at "teaching schools" (a derogatory term for small liberal arts colleges), a professor's job is to produce original research while engaging in "service" (unpaid labor) to the university and their disciplinary field, such as serving on committees, writing peer reviews, organizing conferences and workshops, and so on. People whose job it is "just" to teach or otherwise interact with undergraduates (through advising or admin) are poorly paid contract workers who can and are hired and terminated from semester to semester.
If we do have human-related obligations, such as the "responsible reporter" obligation mandated by many U.S. states concerning sexual assault, we receive little to no training, as such obligations exist solely to transfer legal blame from the institution onto individuals. At state-funded universities where compliance training is mandatory, it usually takes the form of a ten-minute online quiz.
I know I sound like a disaffected radical when I say this, but this is just another one of those weird things (like academic publishing) that everyone inside academia takes for granted.
Speaking from personal experience, I was more than ten years into academia before I started to realize how absurd and counterproductive this attitude is. It's thoroughly baked into the culture of higher education and extremely difficult to challenge. Universities spend millions of dollars on marketing, but "students come first" is not and has never been how the actual economic model operates.
no subject
Even at "teaching schools" (a derogatory term for small liberal arts colleges), a professor's job is to produce original research while engaging in "service" (unpaid labor) to the university and their disciplinary field, such as serving on committees, writing peer reviews, organizing conferences and workshops, and so on. People whose job it is "just" to teach or otherwise interact with undergraduates (through advising or admin) are poorly paid contract workers who can and are hired and terminated from semester to semester.
If we do have human-related obligations, such as the "responsible reporter" obligation mandated by many U.S. states concerning sexual assault, we receive little to no training, as such obligations exist solely to transfer legal blame from the institution onto individuals. At state-funded universities where compliance training is mandatory, it usually takes the form of a ten-minute online quiz.
I know I sound like a disaffected radical when I say this, but this is just another one of those weird things (like academic publishing) that everyone inside academia takes for granted.
Speaking from personal experience, I was more than ten years into academia before I started to realize how absurd and counterproductive this attitude is. It's thoroughly baked into the culture of higher education and extremely difficult to challenge. Universities spend millions of dollars on marketing, but "students come first" is not and has never been how the actual economic model operates.
TLDR: Higher education sucks and I hate it.