Professor or Teacher: Is the line being redrawn?

People sometimes think that professors are like teachers, but as I will explain to them, a professor is an expert in a field not in teaching. Traditionally the line between relying on professional educators and experts in the field for instruction has been drawn after grade 12. Several developments in higher education - increasing use of community colleges, online courses, and for-profit universities - all are leading to instructors not having freedom to develop their own course. If the instructor for a course does not choose the textbook and design the syllabus, then there is no reason that the instructor needs expertise in the field as opposed to in teaching. The rise of teaching specialists at research universities could also contribute to this shift. The reason for having experts in a field teach is an evaluation that mastery of research in a field (and perhaps an ability to conduct research) is more important than expertise in teaching. Perhaps the time has come to rethink where the line should be drawn. The proportion of the population going to college has risen steadily over the last 100 years; it may be that the percentage of attending graduate school now is around what the percentage attending college was a century ago. Perhaps expertise in the field becomes more important than expertise in teaching only for the 10 or 20 percent of the students who go the furthest in education. If so, we may easily be witnessing a transition of the first two years of college instruction or perhaps all of undergraduate education from professors to teachers.