How should universities balance the requirements of teaching with those of scholarship? The consensus that scholarship counts first and teaching comes second has lost its hold, for in an academic world in which few publish (95 percent of publications come from 5 percent of the professors), insisting on the priority of scholarship rings hollow. The American college and university today must assess what difference scholarship makes to teaching and what teaching means to scholarship. Reaffirming Higher Education asks who teaches, what, to whom, and why.

The authors...