We live in a world of information explosion. With the overwhelming amount of information passed on in colleges and universities, it is natural to feel unconnected to the outside world. Thus it is reasonable to ask for teachers to possess some work in the real word before teaching a class, thus giving more insight to real world applications about a certain field to students. However, we should encourage, not set rules forcing faculty to work outside the academic world. Certain fields, such as philosophy, does not possess a great deal of tangible work outside a university. Further more, some of today's greatest minds function best while inside an institution.

In many fields, such as economics, health care, or art, connecting to the real world is essential. Such fields typically requires professionals to possess both sound academic knowledge, and a clear idea as to what society expect of them, and what problem faces their field in the real world. Engineers are a perfect example to illustrate my point. A good engineer is not only one that knows how to put pieces of machinery together to perform complicated tasks, but also one that could anticipate real world problems that could occur. The bus industry for example, first hired strictly "professionals" to design the first buses for students. The result is that the engineers produced buses that could run, but possess many features that are out of place with the real world (such as safety doors opening on the wrong side of the road). It took years of changes and wasting many resources before such mistakes were rectified. Had such "professionals" recieved greater real word training in school, the number of such mistakes would be decreased, if not disapperaing altogether.

However, in certain fields, it would do little benefit for faculty and student alike for teachers to practice outside jobs. Philosophy, as mentioned above, for one. But the one that comes first to mind is particle physics--the study of the microcosmos. Indeed, physics as a whole is involved with unravelling a unified theory of existence, save for a few branch of this field, it does not contain much to do with the real world. Indeed, in the microscopic world, scientific institutions such as colleges or universities are the only place for faculty to work and conduct their experiment, one can hardly expect there would be many real world usage for learning the composition of microscopic compositions. In such cases, we would do better to allow faculty to continue with their work undisturbed.

To suggest that universities and colleges should encourage their faculty to apply for real world jobs outside institutions is reasonable, and should be implemented to ensure our students get the most out of their course work, however, we should never demand such enactment, it should ultimately be up to the teacher, and the nature of the field to make the final decision.