Thus, research issues from excellent teaching. A close relationship with students who are critical thinkers results in discovery and synthesis of new knowledge. We teach urban life through which students walk every day on their way to classes. Many of the buildings in which we hold class once housed people who made history. Real teaching demands that teachers understand what it's like to raise a child alone, without another parent, and what it's like to find day care, or night care in order to go to class.
Real teaching knows what binds student's jeans, year after year, to the chairs in class.
Real teaching knows that most of the students today are television kids, that teaching must change to serve this generation and that change demands research. The results of research demand more teaching and more discovery. What VCU should do is define research as broadly as possible, encourage and reward an array of research paradigms within and between disciplines. Interdisciplinary teaching will result in interdisciplinary research. The backbone of VCU will always be students, and the spinal cord will always be faculty who teach excellently.