# |## |#2. Professors get summers off; industry employees don't.
# |## 
# |## What professor gets the summer off ?  The primary purpose of a professor
# |## at a university is to publish.  Teaching is secondary.  The summer
# |## is when professors are able to do the research required for their
# |## papers.
# |#
# |#I'm told by my advisor that only at some universities is publishing
# |#the primary emphasis; many professors in the Cal State University
# |#system don't publish at all.  Those that prefer teaching are under
# |#no pressure to publish.
# |#
# 
# When discussing and issue, it helps that all participants use the same
# definitions, although this rarely occurs on Usenet.
# 
# When I use the term "university", I think of an organization that has
# a Bachelors, Masters, and PhD program.  I believe that Cal State schools
# do not.  I call them colleges.  UC schools are universities.  At a univeristy
# the number one goal is to publish.

Cal State University system offers bachlors and masters degrees.  The
Ph.D. is not offered, because of opposition from UC.

# At the Cal State schools, do the professors you speak of have PhDs?  At

Nearly all the professors have PhDs.  I haven't had a professor who didn't,
though my wife has had a couple of professors with just an M.A.  A friend
had an instructor who didn't have a degree at all, but because he had
been Minister of Culture for the Black Panthers, he was teaching anyway.
He had a bad habit of usually not showing up to teach the class, and
finally quit in disgust at the racism of a university that expected him
to show up to teach.

# a university you have professors with PhDs and then Teaching Assistants (TAs).
# TAs were the slave labor, graduate students who got their tuition paid, and
# a few hundred a month for living expenses in exchange for doing all the grunt
# work.  The professors taught the lectures, with 100 to 500 students per class,
# then the TAs taught the labs, with 20 to 30 per class.
# 
# Tim Fogarty (FOGARTY@SIR-C.JPL.NASA.GOV)

At Sonoma State University, typical class size is 20 to 30 per class.
Teaching is definitely more the goal, and sometimes, it actually happens.
The best professors at Sonoma State U. are equivalent to the best 
professors I had at UCLA and USC.