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What do teaching faculty do during semester breaks?
I'm specifically asking about full-time teaching staff (unlike part-time teaching staff such as professors, who as I understand it can just spend more time on research during semester breaks).
I understand US universities pay their professors only 9 months a year, which effectively means they're free to do whatever they want in the remaining 3 months. Does this apply to lecturers too? If so, since professors acquire funding so they can continue to draw a salary during these 3 months, do lecturers also have funding targets? In that case, are they even full-time teaching staff (since they also have to do research to actually acquire funding)?
What about non-US universities where staff are paid for the entire year?
From what I know about high school, there are some duties that teachers must do during the semester breaks (such as grade exam papers & discuss what to teach next year), but they are few. Once these duties are done then teachers have no duties - they don't have to show up to school - so they usually take the chance to go on holiday. However, at least in the high school I studied in, these periods are short - there's a maximum of 2 months of teaching downtime in the academic year (this neglects the afore-mentioned time taken to grade exam papers etc), which is well below the downtime at university. Surely lecturers don't just go on holiday for 3 months (they must run out of annual leave)? But if they don't go on holiday, what do they do?

"What about non-US universities where staff are paid for the entire year?": There may be not teaching staff. For instance in my country there are no positions exclusively dedicated to teaching.

Well, my brother is currently off in the Sierra Nevada climbing...

In Saudi Arabia, there is no designated "teaching" position and almost all  faculty enjoy 60 days of vacation.

They do w/e they want, and if it's in violation of their contract it's called moonlighting. (which part of this question's way-too-many questions aren't POB?)

Many of my high school teachers had a summer job, because they are paid poorly. Adjuncts (the typical position for a teaching-only position at a US university, in my experience) are paid far worse.

"more time on research" or working a summer job cause a starting professor is not the most lucrative venture sometimes

In the United States, the "9 month salary" for a faculty member is typically paid out over 12 months.  For those faculty who engage in research or other pursuits during the summer months, the "9 month" designation gives the rate at which their salary can be enhanced through external funding.
So, what do "full time teaching" faculty do over the summer?  Colleagues of mine in such positions generally still look at this time as an opportunity to focus on their professional interests, whether that is doing research or some other field-appropriate equivalent such as writing books, directing theatrical performances, etc.
Teaching responsibilities may also extend through the summer (and may be additionally compensated or not, depending on circumstances). Examples include teaching summer courses, preparing new course material, and supporting student groups' activities (summer is a common time for technical competitions, for example).
And some, in some circumstances, really do just take the summer slowly. In my experience, though, that tends to be the exception rather than the rule, with so many other opportunities and responsibilities at hand.

"really do just take the summer slowly" - it's not that uncommon, as far as I've observed...

I'm pretty busy providing teaching and pastoral support for student who are doing resits or late assessments due to mitigation (such as medical issues). In addition I'm supporting student overseas via skype and instant messenger and pre-arrival support for overseas students. The time-zone difference also makes this quite challenging. Some of that is helping student work remotely who lack the technical skills to do it.
Shortly the late submissions will be submitted (as noted above) and then I have to grade them and give feedback and then start preparing for new student induction and welcome events. There will be examination boards and invigilation duties also.
I'm also improving the current teaching material, online pages on the VLE and so on.
There are quality process reports to be prepared on completed courses so management get their reports and completing students can look at quality and course reviews.
I also have to deal with a significant number of individual student queries from students who do not fully understand their results, or see a problem in their results or are in some other way unhappy with the information they have received from the automated information systems and want a human face of the system.
Then on top of that every thing @flyto listed. Then all the new edicts and demands from university managers who thinks we have nothing better to do with our summer.

Some examples from the UK,

Research. Even staff who are theoretically on a teaching contract may need to do research for career development, or want to do research out of interest.
Writing grant proposals.
Other non-teaching commitments. Maybe they're the external examiner for a PhD. Maybe they sit on the University's Committee on Paperclip Allocation. Maybe they have a backlog of six things they promised to peer review in April, and now it's July.
Marking, supervision, teaching, etc., on courses that don't stop for the long summer break. E.g. in the UK it's common for one-year masters courses to take a calendar year, from September to August. Also, even courses that have summer holidays may have resits in that time.
Preparing courses for the next year. Especially if it's something you haven't taught before, it's difficult to do all the prep during termtime.
Exploring new ideas, or learning new skills.
Teaching (or attending!) summer schools or other training.
Holidays. Even academics need to stop occasionally ;-)

Here at the college I work for, most full time instructors (we aren't a research place) are on "9 month contract" which means they teach 5 classes in the Fall and Spring terms, and are off Summer, but their pay is split across all 24 paychecks we receive in a year.  Note that we have a few 12 month faculty, mostly in specialized areas that are working other jobs at the college - for example, the Stage Manager for our theater teaches in the drama department, but his teaching 2 classes is part of his regular 40 hour work week.  Our nursing faculty (well, most of our health sciences - nursing, resp. therapy, radiology and nuke med, etc) are also 12 month contracted employees, since they teach courses and do clinical supervision all year long.
During summer, quite a few folk "check out" and we don't hear from them until the day before classes start.  Some are even proud of the fact that they don't check email, etc. which makes administrative stuff kinda hard to do at times.
Many 9 month faculty also choose to teach extra classes over the summer, which they do at adjunct pay rate (about $2200 for a 3 credit class over 6, 9 or 12 weeks depending on sub-term the course is in).  Teaching extra in summer can be a major pay boost for faculty, since in theory (and some do this) you can teach a full load (4 classes) in A term, and another 4 in B term.  Most often I see this as people get near the "entire retirement" stage, since our state retirement system is based on the average of your highest 5 years of pay over your service time.

Does it really matter whether you get 24 paychecks over the entire year, or 18 paychecks over 9 months? A pizza isn't more filling if you cut it into 8 slices rather than 6.

@Barmar for tax withholding purposes, various payroll deduction things like health insurance for dependents or retirement plan contributions, etc.  Not to mention it makes it much easier on those who run the payroll system, not having to separate out various classes of FT employees into different pay dates, etc.

My mother, who lectures at a Chinese university, is paid during vacations but has no responsibilities (i.e., does not need to report to work or teach). The same applies in many countries, where university faculty are part of the civil service.
In the U.S., I believe that the 9-month rule applies to lecturers too.

Wow, sounds like magical Christmasland.

@Allure I assume the same applies in many countries: in many countries, university faculty are employed as public servants, and as such they enjoy all the benefits given to public servants, usually including being paid year-round.

@Allure perhaps the grass is greener on the other side...

@xuq01 Indeed, we have 2 months of paid vacations. I do not work there unless absolutely necessary.

I'm pretty sure this applies to most of Europe. In fact, I would say that it's the U.S. that is usually different from the rest of the world when it comes to funding public services such as education or healthcare.

Just to add to the above answers...
Consider that most college faculty receive zero sick leave, zero vacation, and holidays are built-in to the pay schedule.
During the semester/term faculty receive zero overtime, take nights, weekends, and holidays for preparing, grading, training, and more.
Many schools have mandatory things that take place between semesters - turning in grades, attending training, preparing materials, faculty meetings, and more, the 9 months is often 10 months.
In reality, many full-time career employees will get time off (10 holidays, 10 sick, 20 vacation) totaling about 8 weeks.  And, most college faculty get about 8 weeks of time off, it just comes all at once.
K-12 school teachers do get some leave during the year, and less in the summer.
Considering that teachers are generally underpaid compared to what they could make working a "day-job", the summer break is a trade-off.

Is this answer US-specific? Many other countries, at least 145 have some form of paid sick leave by law.

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Can one compensate for poor funding performance elsewhere in determining academic promotion?
Follow up question to How does research funding work in determining academic promotions? since it was too broad.
Take two equally talented researchers, Alice & Bob. To what extent will it matter if Alice has a large amount of grant funding, compared Bob who has little or no grant funding? Can Bob compensate for his lack of grant funding by, e.g., having better teaching evaluations or supervising more undergraduate students?

My Uni's promotion criteria is available online, in detail, for all to see. It has to be. Depending on where you are located, this might be the case for you. Perhaps spend some time reviewing the promotion criteria and schedule a meeting with the admin of whatever office deals with promotions to have them walk you through the criteria. Much more useful to you than asking context specific questions here.

@GrotesqueSI if your university's promotion criteria is publicly available, can you link the document?

Like your other recent questions, this depends on many things, but most especially on the mission of a given institution. In some places good research would vastly outweigh good funding. In others, just the opposite. In teaching institutions, as opposed to primarily research universities, teach might outweigh everything else by a large margin.
But there are certainly institutions where the only viable path to tenure goes through the funding institutions and a successful and continuing record of attracting money. I some of these, the research is actually primarily carried out by the students, not the PI, though under the direction of the PI who is able to fund the lab and its student researchers.
So, first look to the stated mission of the place before making any assumptions. Then make sure that the actual mission is consistent with the stated mission. Sometimes they are at odds for various reasons.

This is highly variable. Each university has its own set of rules and regulations involving promotion and tenure. There can be a range of requirements related to teaching evaluations, research output, service requirements, and community outreach in addition to external funding.
For example, at my institution it is standard to apply for tenure in the 6th year. It is possible to apply early (though I think this means in the fifth year, and not at any time; I would have to read the fine print). Hypothetically, a big grant would look very nice if I were applying for early tenure. But I still have to meet requirements in all of the other areas. No matter how big the grant was, I would still need to meet the requirements in the other areas to be granted tenure.
Also, if Bob was bringing in less grant money than I was, it is likely that there is not much that he would need to compensate for. If he is applying to grants and bringing in SOME grant money, and meeting the requirements in the other areas, we are both likely to be promoted on the same schedule. Although yes, in the case of early tenure, Bob might have better luck if he has stellar teaching reviews, this will show he is exceeding expectations in at least some areas to justify being granted tenure early.
This is of course specific to my institution, which is a public institution focused primarily on teaching. There are quite possibly institutions where external funding is the #1 thing they look at when dealing with promotion.

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What's the point of PhD theses if nobody reads them?
At best, the PhD thesis is read by:

The author
The examiners
The supervisor
The author's parents
The author's roommate / spouse / fellow students in research group

Or less than 10 people in total. What, then, is the point of writing it? Writing a complete PhD thesis is a time-consuming process, and that time could easily have gone into taking more courses, doing more research, supervising more students, and so on. Of course the PhD student has no choice but to write one, because the programme typically requires it. However that still begs the question as to why the programme requires it in the first place. if the thesis is so useless that so few people read it, what's the point of demanding a thesis as a prerequisite for graduation?
Somewhat related: What is the point of a PhD thesis whose content already exists in published papers? Still, even if there are more readers because a thesis provides a gentle introduction to the field, it seems more sensible to me to just write a monograph and leave out the thesis.

"less than 10 people" is already generous...  I am quite sure my parents will never read more than 200 pages about IT security. Same is true for most friends who will have a look but might not go into detail. I sometimes say: You are in trouble if more than two people read your dissertation. The first two are your examiners, the third one is some unfriendly guy searching for flaws in your thesis... ;-)

I question the premise of this question. I have several PhD Theses on my harddrive, all of which I have read, most several times, some of them I re-read regularly. And I am none of the things the OP listed, I am not even an academic. And I have good reasons to believe that e.g. Gilad Bracha's thesis has been read by dozens and Roy Fielding's by hundreds, just to name two.

First, you say "at best", but those words should be "at minimum."   There are plenty of world-shaking Ph.D. theses out there.  Second, well, heck, you could say the same about almost all published research.  I'd bet 90% of scholarly papers could easily be filed under "doesn't matter."

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

You're assuming the research in the thesis is only found in the thesis. In the sciences, it's common for the thesis to be an aggregation of previously published papers.

There are cases where the thesis gets published as a book or in another venue in a modified form - see, for example, Purely Functional Data Structures by Okasaki, which was based directly on his master's thesis.

The premise of this question may hold in some fields, but it is completely off in others. Quite a few PhD dissertations are published (usually in slightly reworked form) as monographs which are bought and sold worldwide, and I can name several that have been read by hundreds or thousands of people.

"What's the point of PhD theses if nobody reads them?"
That's falsifiable, trivially so.

Your question would be perfectly valid if you switch "PhD" to "Masters" or "Bachelors". Which is why writing a thesis is no longer required to get a Masters degree in US universities.

I read (not in their entirety) several theses in my own area of research, and I looked at several others. They are often immensely useful because, unlike most papers, they are not severely constrained in length and can contain a wealth of information.

If you think writing a thesis is a waste of time because you would rather just write a monograph on the topic, then you can spend a few extra months writing that monograph and submit it as a thesis.

I read other peoples PDH thesis while conducting my own research. In physics at least, few papers go into detailed derivations, while a PHD thesis generally will. For this reason they are good literature because they cover detail other forms do not.
For my current work I have read the relevant sections of two thesis (one masters and one PHD).

Like with actors in the acting industry, once in a while one will "shoot up" and will be ready by a lot of people and used/cited elsewhere and might spark and idea in someone else's head. But of course, most of them will just serve the purpose of the student receiving a degree and that's it.

I read a bunch of PhD theses (or at least parts thereof). Mostly because they had results relevant to my thesis that I couldn't find elsewhere (or didn't have access to), or sometimes because they greatly helped me in writing my own.

What's the point of a PhD at all?

I feel really bad that nobody reads my dissertation. I am an engineering PhD, and people are more interested in reading my journal publications.

For simplicity, I am going to let your premise that (virtually) nobody reads a PhD thesis stand, even though that's debatable and also a bit field-dependent. There are still a number of reasons for it to exist:

It's arguably more of a "writing to learn" task anyway. Students don't produce theses for the sake of the thesis, but to learn how to do research and write it up properly in a long, coherent book. Even if no single person outside the committee reads the thesis ever, it was still a good learning experience for the student.
There is a lot of history around the concept of a doctoral program requiring developing in new thesis (in the original meaning of the word), writing it down in a book (the dissertation), and defending this new thesis against the local learned community. Even though nowadays many fields don't communicate new research ideas through long books anymore, there is still enough historical appeal to the idea that few programs want to get out of it entirely. The entire process of writing and defending the dissertation also has some appeal as a significant milestone event, which nicely demarks the end of an era for the student - he is no longer a student, but a complete member of the academic community.
In many countries there is a legal angle to this. At least in Europe, a PhD program is usually legally defined to conclude with the production of a doctoral dissertation of some kind.
In the age of "stapler theses" (which consist of a synopsis and a collection of previously published papers in verbatim), the entire affair is fairly low-cost anyway. My last students rarely spent longer than 2 or 3 months on the actual "thesis writing".

+1 but I will add that there are places where stapler theses are not allowed, and on the other hand there are places where if you publish papers you don't need to write a separate thesis.

@xLeitix you are right but the last point is not true, at least in many countries in Europe. In addition to that, it is quite common that the write-up period is unpaid in many universities, as you are not doing research any more.

@Nox a professor who does not encourage publications What?! That sounds almost like an oxymoron to me.

Another point: Many theses are first drafts of books that are published and read more widely.

I had to look up what a sandwich thesis is: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/149/what-is-a-sandwich-thesis

@Nox You're overgeneralising when referring to "Europe". There are big differences between different European countries as to whether sandwich theses are encouraged, discouraged, or disallowed.

@Nox I know several people in Germany and Austria with "stapler theses". Seems very hard to make general statements on that.

"2 or 3 months" for a stapler thesis? Those I have seen take less than a week, as they consist of merely writing a 5-10 page blurb in front, and copy-pasting already accepted/appeared papers as chapters.

@BorisBukh The ones at the universities were I have experience require something like a 40-ish page synopsis. But sure, expectations matter.

@Thomas I've worked with professors who could be described that way. In experimental physics you can either write a bunch of papers documenting your apparatus and minor results as you go along, or just write one major paper covering the results when you're done, with maybe a follow-up to describe the apparatus and technical/analysis details (or just keep that in students' theses). He tended towards the latter, except when he really needed to justify funding.

I share Boris’ bewilderment at your time frame for a stapler thesis: At my old Uni it was common to write the entire thesis, from scratch, in that time frame (3–4 months). True, the thesis is often based on published research in some form but copy&paste is definitely not allowed.

Time to do the stapling will depend a lot on the field.  In math it's very hard to read papers outside your area of expertise, and so it's quite common that only one or two people at your school could easily read and understand your articles, but you'll have three or four people on your committee.  So there's an expectation that you write at least the introduction so that it's aimed at a broader mathematical audience than a research article would be, and this takes some time.

I would argue that (at least in my field, which is maths), it is rarely the case that people read theses entirely. However, they are often used to look up things and to compare results with

Some universities collect pages of unpublished garbage that no body reads. In the past, if thesis was required, it was because there were not many publishing journals. These days best results can be published and there is no need to write unnecessary garbages or thesis.

I am currently reading a thesis and its got a lot more information and proofs that the papers and books derived from it did not have because of the space constraint. Its an absolute life-saver. Yes someone will read your thesis. It may not make the NewYork Times best seller list but someone somewhere will read it.

"No-one ever reads a PhD thesis" is a big assumption, one that I would think says more about what you think a PhD thesis is about, and less about what it actually is about.
I have read many PhD theses in my time. I find them to be a very different resource to papers. Often a PhD thesis is a very good read if you want to get a good overview of a particular field, explained in relatively simple language, and introducing and building up a complex subject relatively from scratch in easily digestible logical blocks, rather than assuming most knowledge is known to the reader.
Similarly, a PhD thesis is also more likely to go into some depth / proofs / exhaustive experiments that are typically omitted from journal publications on account of space and conciseness.
As a bonus, a PhD thesis is far more likely to be accessible to the general public than its respective papers, as the latter typically tend to be behind paywalls, whereas the former is typically accessible on-demand for free from their respective universities.
Finally, if you are lucky, your PhD thesis may form the cornerstone for an entire field, far more than a single paper might.
Having said all that, one factor that skews one's impression of how often theses tend to be read, is that it is still more likely that subsequent authors reading the thesis will cite the relevant papers generated from it instead, since they are more relevant in the context of a citation, therefore giving a wrong impression about how useful PhD theses are when one is exploring the literature in the first place.

I too question the assumption. I have had two different researchers at two different institutions come to me to confirm that the these they had in hand was actually mine. The reason for the confusion is that the these is in one field and I am working in another field.

+1 Also, potential employers may ask to see an electronic copy of the thesis to get an idea of the technical and writing skills of the applicant. This is especially useful when hiring a recent PhD (who may have not yet published extensively from their doctoral research) for a post-doctoral position.
;-)

Can't upvote this enough. Reading a paper on an unfamiliar topic is often horrible -- "this result is proved in [A,B,C]" (which all use different notations and formalism, and are difficult to unify); "the proof is simple and left to the reader" (only simple when you already know how it works); "an introduction can be found in book [X]" (which covers it in passing, in a very different way from the paper). No. A thesis can provide an incredible introduction to a specific subject, if well written, in a way that a paper simply can't or won't.

@RichardRast I can’t help but think you are unfairly comparing well-written theses with poorly written papers.

@JeffE in a perfect world there would always be a well written paper, but often the paper that proves the big result is not great at communicating that result to outsiders. This was my experience, fair or not. Theses added value

It might have been true that very few people read theses when they only existed as a single copy held in the degree-granting institution's library, and were only indexed in that library's card catalog, but they're becoming more and more accessible in our electronic era. I've even had researchers request undergraduate senior theses that they discovered through WorldCat. My social science undergraduates often love dissertations, because as the product of very young researchers they are much more likely to be about topics of interest than the product of more established researchers.

@RichardRast It seems to me very common for papers to have very short (relative to a thesis) length limits. That alone is a huge barrier to making the paper include enough introductory material for people outside the particular area of the paper.

@RichardRast The most blatant case of that I've seen amounted to "the reader may guess that X holds true, but I simply don't care" in a professional cryptography paper.

The main skill that students should learn during their PhD and demonstrate to graduate is producing, describing, and defending scientific results.
Thus, when a PhD student wishes to graduate, they have to present some work that justifies this degree.
This work is, broadly speaking, the thesis.
Technically speaking, this can just be a bunch of peer-reviewed papers, and cumulative theses (a.k.a. stapler theses) are more or less exactly this, but the student is usually required to write an introduction and conclusion as a framework for their papers.
However, there are many reasons why a student cannot provide these or published papers do not reflect the entire work of the PhD student in question:

The field may have very long peer-review times, e.g., pure mathematics.
The field’s publishing and hiring culture favours one big paper in a highly ranked journal comprising everything, e.g., biology.
Scientific communication in the field mostly happens in form of large monographs (which a thesis can be).
The PhD work is only a piece in a huge project and is not suitable for being published on its own.
Some parts of the PhD work have not (yet) been published when the student wishes to graduate.

A thesis gives PhD candidates the opportunity to graduate in these cases.
Note that in most of these cases, the writing work spent on the thesis is not wasted on a few readers, because the material will be reused in peer-reviewed papers later¹ or the thesis itself will actually be read by more people.
So from a certain point of view, your premise is wrong: The thesis will be read by more people; it’s just not in form of the thesis itself.
This still leaves the point of why PhD students are forced to write an introduction and conclusion to a cumulative thesis, but then:

This is not a lot of work (I did this in a few weeks).
It may spur the student to see their work in a broader picture.
It is the most useful information for the thesis committee. (Depending on how the committee is formed, they clichéically only read the introduction and conclusion.)
It does train scientific writing on a level not seen in regular papers.

¹ though these are usually not read by that many people either

"Depending on how the committee is formed, they clichéically only read the introduction and conclusion". While this is true, every place I've known holds this as a poorly keep secret, rather than an official fact. The committee members are always expected to read the entirety of the work. During a pre-thesis exam, I was told by a committee member that I should leave to annexes a few developments that were only introductory and known in the literature. He complained about having to read them all even though I suggested by email that those parts could be skipped.

The purpose of a PhD thesis is to demonstrate that the author can do all of the following:

Organize a large project
that makes an original contribution to scientific knowledge;
have the persistence to carry out such a large project;
know the state-of-the-art in the field well enough to recognize an original contribution;
have good enough communication skills to explain, diagram, and present the results;
have the scientific rigor to present the results honestly, without "lying with statistics"; and
provide valid citations for how the project builds upon existing work in the field.

A typical organization looking to hire a PhD is looking to fill an Associate Professor position or a senior scientific researcher position.  The position typically is responsible for organizing a line of scientific research, obtaining funding, and presenting results that are worth the funders' investment.
Several posters on this thread have suggested "stapler theses" be used instead.  Such theses do not demonstrate the ability to organize a large project, nor the persistence to carry it out.

[Stapler theses] theses do not demonstrate the ability to organize a large project, nor the persistence to carry it out. – The format of the thesis has little to do with this. A well-done PhD project having all the aspects you champion should produce a series of coherent papers. This is what demonstrates what you want. Whether they are stapled together (with a proper frame of introduction and conclusion) or rearranged into a monograph makes little difference. Of course there are stapler theses that do not do this and are an incoherent mess, but that also applies to monographs.

This question is based on a false premise, namely that nobody ever reads theses. This is a bit of a meme among grad students, but it's just that: A fashionable whinge. It's not actually true.
I've read plenty of theses, occasionally they will have some data that I need, I've even cited them. The biggest reason that I don't do it more is that usually the content of theses in my field is also published in papers, and it's better to use the original report.
In humanities theses are expected to be original works, and often people publish them as books. I've actually read many such books, often without realizing it was a thesis - the topic was just interesting to me. I found the book in a library, where it was bound with a professional cover, so presumably it was published by a real publisher. Not necessarily a best seller, but I'm sure more than 10 people read it. Some people must have even paid for it.
Similarly, many people stick to the topic of their thesis and keep reworking it into books and papers along the same line. In that case people may not have read the thesis, but the writing they did consume has its foundation in the work that went into the thesis.
There are plenty of people who graduate without publishing much. If such a person were applying for a job, certainly being able to look at their thesis would be valuable.
But to ask about readership is to miss the point. The thesis is an exam. Do you complain that writing papers for a class is pointless because only the instructor will read them? The thesis is exactly like an exam. It's your final exam of PhD school. You need to pass to show that you have learned enough to graduate. It might seem absurd to have an exam hundreds of pages long, but then again, big degree, big exam. You're not really required to make it hundreds of pages long, in any case.

Until about 100 years ago, the PhD degree did not exist in many advanced academic environments. It postdates, by far, rigorous academic research in any subject. It has become the entry-level qualification for an academic career, I suggest, as a crude mechanism to weed out people who like the idea of an academic career but who lack the basic abilities to prosper in such a career.
Likewise, to be licensed to drive a car one has to take a test. The test does not really relate to generalised ability to drive, but it signals that you can't just sit in a car and drive it.
Some people can drive well, even if they have never taken a test, and some people can be brilliant academics without ever having to write a PhD thesis.
The answer to the question "what is the point of the PhD thesis..." is that writing it is the test you have to pass if you want an academic  career. It is a different question to ask why is the PhD a basic requirement for an academic career.
For some research students, those who are not interested in an academic career but who are very interested in their subject, however, the requirement to write a thesis is a kind of realty check on their research. Without the need to write a thesis I could flatter myself that my work is ground-breaking; writing a thesis sets a bar, maybe not very high, that distinguishes reality from vanity.

Much of the point of the dissertation is to demonstrate that you really understand something, which isn't really a function of journal articles or conference papers. In mathematics, anyway, the best thing about doctoral dissertations (and some master's theses) is that the good ones have thorough reviews of the literature and complete expositions of foundational material. In many cases, it's the only place to find details that are too basic for journals and too specialized for textbooks. So even a dissertation that isn't great from a research standpoint can be extremely useful for its exposition and bibliography.

Please think of the mathematician John Tate's 1950 Princeton thesis on harmonic
anaylsis. This single thesis made him world-famous. Thesis is an intellectual start for
many academics,a sort of ladder to the higher world of thought and approach.

Riemann, Gauss, Grothendieck, Serre, Scholze, and various other mathematicians throughout history produced absolutely fantastic doctor thesis that shaped entire fields.
Riemann's, for example, marked the beginning of the study of Riemannian Geometry and of Riemann surfaces.
In his master's thesis, William Karush delineated the KKT conditions.

Nowadays, such achievements are far better placed in journal articles than theses.

@orion: why?  Journal articles are forced to be too short for some things.  A thesis gives the author a lot more flexibility.

This is very field-dependent. In some fields, theses are read.
However, my experience in computer science is that the thesis is pointless, aside from being a degree requirement.
Your premise is optimistic. I am confident that, apart from myself and my advisor, no one has read more than 5% of my PhD thesis. And my advisor probably only read about 15% of it and skimmed the rest (based on the feedback he gave). I remember that, during my defense, one of the committee members had printed out the first ten or so pages of my thesis and was quickly reading the abstract before I started speaking.
My thesis has accrued precisely zero citations in three years, while the papers that went into it have gotten hundreds.
This is a bit disappointing, given that I put some effort into my thesis. I improved and simplified some results and included more detail and exposition than in the corresponding papers. That was a waste of my time.
My experience seems typical for computer science. The culture is that no one reads theses and they are a waste of time. But, again, this may be different in other fields or even in other countries.

The premise is not valid. I have read hundreds of theses and dissertations when conducting research and regularly cite them in my work. One issue is that many theses and dissertations are collected behind various digital walls (Proquest, University repositories, etc) and are not easily viewable in a free and open way on the internet. It surprisingly still takes a library visit or special request to get a hold of them. I personally posted my 2012 dissertation on the web myself and now have a reasonable number of citations to it. I get questions and comments on a regular basis about the document and its contents to this day. Maybe we just need simply make the documents accessible.
EDIT: Just wanted to add that having a goal to write a theses that people do want to read, can also help. Writing with the expectation that no one reads it will likely diminish the quality and attractiveness to readers.

One aspect of this being overlooked is that often times broader issues in a particular field of study - issues perhaps years down the road - will drive retrospective research into what others have thought or written about in the same field. A research work in one decade might prove to be a foundational, essential work in another. Think of it as a loose analog to lawyers and judges seeking legal precedents, but in a more academic context.
Granted, this may be an exceptional case, and surely there are many PhD dissertations sitting on shelves, untouched since their completion, but I think most dissertation efforts were undertaken with a sincere effort to research something of value; there's really no way of knowing at the time it's written of its relative future worth.
As an example, many years ago, I read a good portion of a PhD dissertation on "tri-state" or "indeterminant-state" computing - but it was written about 40 years ago. Right now, quantum computing explores variations on almost precisely this very concept. That makes the dissertation I read borderline prophetic, as it was literally decades before any notion of quantum computing existed.

Back up a bit.  A PhD thesis is meant to describe research that was explicitly conducted to advance the state knowledge in some relevant manner.
The extent to which it is not read is a failure of some sort to reach that ideal:

The state of knowledge was not sufficiently advanced.
The advance is not sufficiently relevant (yet).
The advance has not been adequately disseminated (yet).

To be clear, failure above refers specifically to the readership size question.  There can be other measures of achievement that contribute to the "success" of the PhD thesis: Candidates may have gained

knowledge
research skills
credentials

that will serve them well throughout their career.  But make no mistake: A PhD student should strive to make contributions beyond the benefits received.  Ideally, the thesis will be read by more than those with only a personal interest in the candidate, whether by cover-to-cover reading or selective consultation for details elaborating on earlier publications of preliminary/intermediate results.

I think this misses the point of the question. There are ways to contribute to the field other than through a thesis, namely publications. So a thesis not being read does not mean the author didn’t contribute to the field.

@Thomas, you're welcome to commiserate with OP about the futility of writing PhD dissertations.  I, on the other hand, disagree with the premise.  I also disagree with both your objection here and your answer, including where you state without evidence that in computer science, no one reads theses and they are a waste of time.  Contrary to your objection here, I maintain that successful PhD research will lead to readership beyond the inner circles of the candidate, your unfortunate personal, anecdotal experience notwithstanding.

I maintain that successful PhD research will lead to readership beyond the inner circles of the candidate. That is true, but that doesn't mean the thesis will be read. Many theses are redundant in the sense that most of their content also appears in published journal/conference papers. Thus readers have the choice between reading the thesis and reading the paper. I maintain that they almost always opt for the paper, at least in computer science.

The point of hard work is to get good (at something).
People will usually by nature be lazy.
Therefore it is (usually) necessary to find a way to trigger this hard work somehow.

Course requirements and theses and (ultimately) using the fear of "dropping out" are some ways to try and make this hard work happen.

In the hard sciences, I really don't see the value of the exercise.  Seems like more benefit from learning to publish and publishing real papers.  If anything, it can be the opposite of value as there are people who write a thesis and don't have independent papers.  Although maybe sweating the thesis is away to put the weaker students through something (some exercise) before you give them the union card.  In some European countries it's actually even explicit that the thesis is just 3 published papers (without even an effort to synthesize them).
However instead of worrying about changing society, my advice is to just deal with the situation.  Do your best on papers.  And for the thesis just get by (it is pass fail after all).  Note that does NOT mean to let obvious errors or typos or poor writing get by.  It should still be good professional work product, like a technical reort in government or industry.
So:

Don't kill yourself on the lit search.
Don't go learning LATEX if you don't already use it.
Don't use some super complicated Word template that is hard to manipulate.
Don't use some complicated drafting or graphing program if not familiar with it already.
Do fit in unpublished work so it is "somewhere" but don't kill yourself to finish up every thread by doing more experiments.  Assuming yu have enough in the main material, the point is just to somewhere put down stuff so not lost to lab group. But don't kill yourself on this...it's a nice to do.
Same as last bullet but also use opportunity to document any little tricks of methods or apparatus that might help the group.  But again...this is a niceness you are doing...not the main point.
Do get it done fast and get out of there.  Try to avoid a lot of editorial criticism.

P.s.  I actually do think theses can be useful looking at a field or a research group especially when coming up to speed (or for members of same lab group).  Get a feel for what is going on.  Some between the lines given.  But my impression is still that most people don't know this trick or do it enough.  Also, I have definitely seen people omit citing prior work from theses.

I disagree. One must always learn better Technical writing skills, formatting and grammar skills, graphic , schematic and block diagram skills and make easy to read. Not coincidental duplicates of 10k similar theses.

If you want to learn new typing skills do them along the way because it is worthwhile on its own.  Not when you are in crunch time finishing up. Have seen a lot of students struggle because they added on new challenges like this, while they were in the midst of producing a big document under some time pressure.  Also, despite the very computer bent of this website, there are a vast amount of fields/people who value writing ability (sentences and words and paragraphs and logic and organization) far above typesetting. Just look at the corporate world.  LATEX is valued less than writing skill.

The major plus of writing a thesis for me was latex practice...

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What does a head of department do?
Clearly the position must come with some added responsibilities. What are they?
If the extra duties are purely administrative, why does one need a professor to be head of department? Can a non-full professor be the head of department?
If the answer varies by field, I'm most interested in the sciences.

Like in a university?

Yes, e.g. "Head of the chemistry department".

Are there job openings for that role at a university that you are interested in?

See What is life as "Head of Department ____" like?

Note that there is an important distinction between a Head and a Chairman (Chairwoman, Chairperson) of a (U.S.) department. A department Head is a more or less permanent role, while a Chairman is essentially an "elected" (sometimes "imposed") position that rotates on a typically annual basis through the Full Professors (to share the pains of the position fairly).

Actually, @E.DouglasJensen, I don't recognize a formal distinction between the two titles. I've seen them used interchangeably, though there are certainly different conceptions of the role as you point out.

@Buffy, those two conceptions are taken very seriously by CMU CS and many other university departments I am familiar with--it is a huge status difference.

In the US the situation varies greatly, depending on the university. In some places the head is hired specifically for that position. In some, he/she is chosen by vote of the faculty. In some, the position rotates among faculty every few years. In some, a distinguished academic is hired to add "stature" to the department.
A head is normally a tenured person, but he/she can hold any rank, especially when the position rotates. Non-tenured but tenure track faculty (assistant professors) are normally spared this duty so that they can spend efforts needed to get tenure.
The head normally, but not always, has teaching duties and possibly also carries on research. But the load is reduced to allow for the administrative duties.
The head makes sure that all of the courses are staffed and that everyone gets paid. He/she is responsible for seeking resources from the common university pool, though not necessarily for grant funding. The head may need to approve some aspects of grants when they employ common resources. The head may need to assure funding agencies that the terms of the grant are fulfilled.
The head normally chairs the inevitable periodic faculty meetings that set strategy for the department and distribute duties to the faculty.
The head manages faculty evaluation and may have a voice (or not) in tenure decisions. Usually, the head can veto a positive tenure decision for financial reasons, but I don't believe it is common to have the power to do so otherwise. I doubt that very many places permit the head to veto a negative tenure decision made by a faculty committee.
The head is the manager of record for any professional staff, such as secretaries.
The head is a shoulder to cry on for faculty with problems and for students with complaints. As such, he/she becomes a sort of mediator.
The head answers to the dean when any internal problems spill over into the wider arena. He/she then becomes the defender of anyone in the department who needs (and deserves) defending.
Normally a person who leaves the head position retains faculty tenure and returns to the normal teaching, service, and research duties.

The answer will not only depend on the discipline but also on the country you are in.
The short summary (in my country) is: You are responsible for everything ;-) - from funding to interpersonal issues, over teaching to relation to the university and external partners. Not forgetting teaching, PhD students, other staff, etc...

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text:
How did journal editors find peer reviewers before the internet?
How did journal editors find peer reviewers before the internet? I personally find Google (& Web of Science and similar internet resources) such an invaluable tool that I can't imagine how editors from before the internet age did it. Presumably the only way is personal contacts, but one can only have so many personal contacts. There would also be no easy way to tell if a person is a suitable reviewer. Even if their papers can be found in the references of the article, they might still be a PhD student who's just starting out in the field.
Related: How do Journals find reviewers and their contact information? However, most of the methods described there rely on the internet.

Unless the research is interdisciplinary and you specifically want every sub-field covered, I personally see no harm in a PhD student being one of 3+ reviewers. Not to mention authors may appear in the references list more than once, author order gives information about seniority in many fields etc.

There were several possibilities:

Editor's personal knowledge
Looking at the cited references
Looking at the journals' indexes. At the time, journal would publish yearly indexes of the papers published by keyword and of the authors. Those indexes were an invaluable tool to have a panoramic view of a field, and to get a sense of who were the most prominent researchers. Nowadays the usage of indexes is lost in the Internet, but still in the 1990s one would spend hours in the library reading through those indexes.

I described the rest of the process at the time in this answer of mine.
Indeed, the whole review process, in which the exchanges were carried out mostly by ordinary mail, was much slower than nowadays. If you look at older papers it's not uncommon to see gaps of the order of the year between the manuscript reception date and the publication date.

Does this mean the reviewers are highly likely to be authors of other manuscripts in the same journal?

@Allure Not necessarily because you could look at several journals, but likely. But note also that there wasn't the proliferation of journals we have today.

There was also more of the notion of "the academy" as a community. It may have been smaller, perhaps somewhat exclusive and not so international, nor so fast, but people back then read each others' papers and over time came to know who each other were by reputation. Perhaps some day I'll post a question like "What ever happened to the notion of "the academy"?

@uhoh I was there and I saw it: the rat race ate it alive. R.I.P.

@uhoh Well, this notion still exists in some research groups and institutions. At least, I have it in my social/professional circles still. And personally, I get a similar vibe right here, from Academia.SE. It seems to me that one can still have that community of like-minded people, it is just you could approach nearly everyone some 40-50 years ago and it would be like that, now there are many, many people in the rat race... Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/72636/what-did-a-good-academic-job-market-for-mathematicians-look-like-and-could-it-ev/

There are still some fields that have a "community", for example, most people in RNA biology in the UK know of each other, or at least know the heads of labs. Model organism communities are famously tight-knit - the fly community, the worm community, the fish community. I know someone in the Group A strep community that claims their are only 4 labs in the UK and the whole community fits in a small meeting room.

@allure once upon a rime their was the concept of the "house journal" - more or less everyone in a given field published most of their papers in the same journal (e.g. journal of cellular biology if you were a cell biologist) and "keeping up with the literature" consisted of read this journal, cover to cover, each month.

"If you look at older papers it's not uncommon to see gaps of the order of the year between the manuscript reception date and the publication date." Oh boy you should check out the pure mathematics journals. I'd say it's uncommon to see gaps of less than a year between manuscript reception and acceptance!

@Mathmo123 Ah, yes, I know that mathematics has long review times, but mathematics is really an outlier with respect to most fields.

@Mathmo123 Also still true with other prominent STEM journals...

@uhoh I'm lucky enough to belong to a wonderful small community in which not only is there an open exchange of ideas and collaborations, but also a number of foreign friendships built along the years that make a nice complement to conferences, meetings, visits etc.

@MassimoOrtolano It's good to know that it still happens :-)


text:
What happens if a professor's interests shift dramatically?
Let's say Alice is a professor in underwater basket weaving. She likes the topic, has several PhD students & postdocs, a lab, and so on. But then one day, her husband Bob is knocked down by a car and loses both his legs. Suddenly underwater basket weaving doesn't seem so interesting anymore, and she wonders why she's working on it instead of on robotic limbs.
I imagine in situations like this must have happened before. What usually happens in these cases? I'm guessing the obvious thing to do is to finish supervising all the PhD students, wait till the postdoc contracts run out, and then switch. But a shift like this would probably mean a change in department as well. How would that work? Would the new department even be willing to accept Alice? Alternatively she could stay in her old department, but then she would be a professor of underwater basket weaving that's working on robotic limbs. That doesn't seem sensible (the old department would presumably not be happy, and even if she's tenured such that the old department can't just get rid of her, how is she going to assemble a new research group?).
Also, assuming that robotic limbs is a very different field from underwater basket weaving, Alice is likely to start as a novice. How would that work then? Does she enroll as a Bachelor's student? Does that even make sense?
What is the process of switching fields like?
Related, but considering relatively similar fields with probably different motivations for changing fields: How do academics change their area of research in the middle of their academic career?

the obvious thing to do is to finish supervising all the PhD students, wait till the postdoc contracts run out, and then switch, that doesn't serve Alice's immediate interests particularly well. Instead, Alice could start researching robotic limbs, whilst continuing her supervision of PhD students and postdocs, who are working on underwater basket weaving.

What is the process of switching fields like? I think this is more about switching disciplines, rather than switching fields, given that a department change is mentioned.

Are you assuming that Alice's skills and knowledge isn't at all applicable to the new field? Or that there are no research questions in the new field (at least tangentially) related to her current field?

Depending on the place, the department change can be entirely avoided by just yelling "f** you, I got tenure" at all the relevant authorities, since the professor might effectively be unfireable, as long as he teaches and does research, even if it is not really in the field the department originally hired him for. It is not a terribly diplomatic approach, but some people don't seem to mind being despised by the rest of the people they have to share their department with.

I think you are overestimating how often this happens. How would the Underwater Basket Weaving professor start doing research in robotic limbs, if they have no relevant prior knowledge? Just deciding that robotic limbs are more important isn't enough, you would also need to catch up on an undergrad + grad study worth of knowledge. This is expensive (in terms of time and energy) enough that very few people actually go this route.

Assume that the change is gradual, not abrupt. Alice will want to learn something about the new field so that she is able to do effective research in it. No new department is likely to accept her until this happens. She is also unlikely to completely abandon the old field due to the many constraints, both financial and ethical. Yes, she needs to see to the needs of her current students somehow, and may need to keep publishing in the old field if she wants good annual evaluations.
Once she has a few nice publications in the new area she can start to look for a new position. She probably doesn't need to get any additional degrees unless that is needed to obtain the expertise in the new field, but it would probably help her job search to have some formal qualification in the new field.
One way to get some expertise is to try to collaborate with experts in the new field, first as a junior partner. It is best, of course, if she has something to offer her collaborators, perhaps some research perspective from the old field.
For smaller jumps, of course, it is much easier. Many people switch back (and forth) between math and computer science, for example. This is true even though the basic research methodologies in those two are quite different. I switched from math to CS over a few years at a time when the institution I was at needed expertise in a developing field (long ago). But a person who switches here likely is able to use many of the ideas in the "old" field to enhance their work in the new.