Elsewhere, in the U.S., the dovetailing of research and education has yielded not merely new understanding and new products, but new approaches to problems, along with striking improvements in both the quality and the length of human life. Think of what German science and engineering might be today if all the various Max Planck Institutes had been folded fully into universities such as Mannheim, Kiel, Erlangen, not to mention Wilhelm van Humboldt's University of Berlin, the erstwhile template for early American research universities. I think we know the answer to all these questions. In any case, the U. S. tradition has placed great emphasis upon the reciprocities between research and instruction, the unity between investigation and teaching. Teaching forces one to think and rethink the very foundation of one's discipline, year after year after year.
Good teaching infuses good research, just as good research infuses good teaching.
There is no absence of good news about the climate for research and graduate education. For example, the Bayh-Dole bill has greatly simplified the issue of intellectual property rights for discoveries made on federal grants. Still, serious, but not intractable, stresses and distresses have developed in the external environment, especially in the life support system for graduate education and research in science and engineering. The external environment, however, accounts for only a portion of these stresses and strains. Many of the shortcomings in the present system of research and education in science and engineering within research universities stem from difficulties of our own making.