Teaching Career...... majorly dissappointed.

Professors do a lot of things, they often do a combination of research and teaching. And research does often involve a lot of writing, it could also be projects they are doing together with other people, often other companies which they for example seek financing for. These projects could be huge and last multiple years. Famous professors often write their own course literature that they use for their own courses which they could be entirely responsible for, and they often have to update their courses over the years so that their courses will include new things.

If you would make this in the game, The "write scholarly paper", and "plan lecture" would not give you any money straight off, but would add to your performance and would give you money that you could use to do more research (not use for your own) , it would take months to complete and it could in the end increase your pay as you do more for your university.

So yeah, I don't know if Maxis maybe wanted you to write a lot of books to increase your pay.