"This is an important book . . . [that] will have a wide audience both among intelligent readers interested in reform of the American university as well as among scholars of higher education and teaching."

–Gerald Grant, Syracuse University

Examining a century of university history, Larry Cuban tackles the age-old question: What is more important, teaching or research? Using two departments (history and medicine) at Stanford University as a case study, Cuban shows how universities have organizationally and politically subordinated teaching to research for over one hundred years. He explains how university reforms, decade after decade, not only failed to dislodge the primacy of research but actually served to strengthen it. He examines the academic work of research and teaching to determine how each has influenced university structures and processes, including curricular reform. Can the dilemma of scholars vs. teachers ever be fully reconciled? This fascinating historical journey is a must read for all university administrators, faculty, researchers, and anyone concerned with educational reform.

Larry Cuban is Professor of Education at Stanford University. He is co-author (with David Tyack) of Tinkering Toward Utopia (1995) and author of How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890-1990 (1993) and Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920 (1986).