Academic Research and Instruction

Abstract

The American system of higher education has at its roots a variety of purposes. These include the transmission of culture, preparation of educated citizens, training of professionals, and production of knowledge through scholarly research. Many institutions also have public service as a professed aim [24]. In complex colleges and universities, these goals, which often exist side by side in a single institution, can conflict [29]. The simultaneous pursuit of instructional and research goals is especially difficult in the modern research university [11, 12, 17, 66]. Exacerbating this conflict are the distinct emphases of academic administrators, who focus on campus responsibilities, and faculty, whose activities are driven by the concerns and goals of their disciplinary peers (often outside of their own institutions) [1]. As a consequence, the academic enterprise has shown an alarming disintegration of consensus about purpose on a national level [2, p. 4], especially about the relative importance of the varied higher education functions in society. The development of academic missions, including the importance placed by an academic institution on any set of goals at a specific point in time, has been influenced dramatically by changes in the national agenda [8]. The impact of such social pressures frequently has been