My best teachers in college didn’t do research, and those who did much research were, at best, mediocre teachers. Later I sauntered across an explanation for this in the writings of John Henry Cardinal Newman:
To discover and teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person. He, too, who spends his day in dispensing his existing knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either leisure or energy to acquire new. The common sense of mankind has associated the search after truth with seclusion and quiet. The greatest thinkers have been too intent on their subject to admit of interruption; they have been men of absent minds and idosyncratic habits, and have, more or less, shunned the lecture room and the public school. (Quoted from The Idea of a University, John Henry Cardinal Newman, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902)
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For a brief biography of John Henry Cardinal Newman, click here.
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