Man, did last week’s Globe editorial on reforming higher education get the bien pensants’ knickers in a knot, or what?

Constance Adamson of OCUFA took the predictable “everything would be fine if only there was more money” line. Over at Maclean’s, Todd Pettigrew made a passionate defence of research and teaching being inextricably entwined, largely echoing a piece from the previous week by McGill’s Stephen Saideman, who argued that universities aren’t teaching vs. research but teaching and research.

Methinks some people doth protest too much.

Let’s take it as read that universities are intrinsically about both teaching and research; there’s still an enormous amount of room for discussion about their relative importance. It may be cute to say that choosing between the two is a false dichotomy but in the real world profs make trade-offs: when they increase their research activity, they tend to spend less time teaching. This shouldn’t be controversial. It’s just math.

Unfortunately, obfuscating the trade-offs between research and teaching is a stock in trade of academia. My particular favourite is the old chestnut about research vs. teaching being a false dichotomy because “the best teachers are often the best researchers.” I’m being restrained when I say that this, as an argument, is a bunch of roadapples. As research has consistently shown, the relationship between the two is zero. Being a good researcher has no effect on the likelihood of being a good teacher and vice versa.

Look, there’s lots to quibble with in the Globe editorial, not least of which is the ludicrous insouciance with which it treats the concept of quality measurement. But most of its basic points are factually correct: by and large, parents and taxpayers think the main purpose of universities is to teach undergraduates and prepare them for careers (broadly defined). Canadian academics are, in fact, the most highly paid in the world outside the Ivy League and Saudi Arabia. They are also demonstrably doing less teaching than they used to, ostensibly in order to produce more research.

Anyone who can’t understand why that combination of facts might provoke at least some questioning about value for money really needs to get out more.

One of the sources of miscommunication here is that the seemingly simple term “research” is actually a very contested term which means enormously different things to different people. More on this tomorrow.