On The Corner this morning, I commented on the battle of teaching vs. scholarship. It drew this reply:

The distracting effects of research are almost totally irrelevant to the quality of undergraduate teaching. Ill-paid and overworked adjuncts, with or without the doctorate, and professors who teach four classes a semester and have no time for teaching, are the vast majority of teachers; those professors who have time for research are a dwindling few at unrepresentative elite colleges. Is the emphasis on research excessive? – perhaps, although that’s a different argument. But it just doesn’t matter a hill of beans.
Also consider that the majority of college students are semi-literates who should not be in college anyway, or even high school, and that teaching would be much easier if we could chop down the number of students by the necessary 50-75%.