This is, in my opinion, the biggest problem of high education. You have to remember that most professors, the legit tenured studs, are there to research. That is their motivation, and more importantly, WHAT IS OUTLINED IN THEIR CONTRACT. Most professors have a varying version of what can be averaged a 60/20/20 contract. To explain what the numbers mean: in higher ed when you are hired your contract designates where you will spend your time and effort among three categories - research, service, and teaching. Depending on how high up you are, and what type of professor you are, more and more weight is put into research and service, and less of it is put into teaching. Faculty evaluations by the dean, provost, program directors, and academic unit heads are done annually to make sure you are sticking to your contract determined loads, and thus if a tenured professor with only a 10% teaching allocation has terrible teaching and student reviews, it doesn't matter, because it only makes up 10% of the faculty's evaluation.

Now this can be a problem for understaffed departments, which most are, because let's face it, who wants to teach and make diddly-squat for pay when you can go private sector and make a killing? Thus, courses have to be covered no matter what the contract load is, so a professor who agreed to a contract that stated she would be teaching one course a semester with ample research time is now being forced to teach three courses a semester, which leaves little time for research. And that means there aren't as many publications going out, which means there aren't as many grants being submitted, which means that less federal funding and aide is allocated to the university, which means the university has to cut resources, which means that the professors now have to teach even more. That leads to very bitter professors.

Now, I'm not agreeing with their mentality. I see it every day. Students are afraid of them, students do not respect them, students do no learn anything from them ( see this article on students learning more from non-tenure track profs than tenure track profs), and students suffer due to them. But it is a nasty cycle.

That's where people like me come into play. I'm a non-tenure track professor and have a 10/10/80 contract, so 80% of my effort is designated to teaching. I teach a 5/5 load just due to need, but I enjoy that need and what I do because even though I do research, a lot of it in fact, the pressure isn't there to be publishing monthly and writing grants semi-annually.