Such stereotypes undermine the sense of community a university needs to foster. Even more fundamentally, insofar as education and scholarship are set over against each other in the social structure of the academy and the personal attitudes of those who work here, the institutional coherence of the research university is undermined. Within the academic world, the system of incentives and rewards is generally agreed to favor the excellent researcher over the excellent instructor. An era of public and private resource constraints is also likely to witness struggles over the relative importance of instruction and discovery, waged on such battlefields as tenure review committees, the pages of intellectual and policy journals, and the chambers of state legislatures. Universities that do not produce coherent answers to questions about the relation of these two central responsibilities may find other forces of society rushing in to fill this policy vacuum, expressing quite different priorities on how to allocate material and intellectual resources.
Stereotypes have consequences that are far from proportional to their accuracy.
Actual experience is more complicated than the disjunctive stereotypes would indicate. No one would dispute that teaching and research can compete for scholars' time, attention, and resources. Emphasis has fallen on one or the other in cyclical fashion, and Eli cites sound reasons to expect another turn of this wheel. His data support the proposition that an academic who pursues scholarship in his or her discipline is more likely to succeed in communicating with students than a colleague who eschews research and focuses on classroom teaching alone. Much imbalance occurs because the two activities are measured along different scales.