The gerundive of the verb “to teach”; also, as a conventional substantive, “the material taught”—though this usage is uncommon, and has come to convey a fusty sententiousness, as in, “I am here to share with you the teaching of a great sage.” Teaching is generally understood to involve the conveyance of information, methods, skills, or perspectives from a person in possession of same to a person substantially not so endowed. Thus the activity implies the existence of “students,” a general term for individuals placing themselves (or having been placed by others) on the receiving end of the teaching act/undertaking/situation. One may, however, “teach oneself” (see GRADUATE STUDENT). Within the context of post-secondary education in the United States, teaching is reliably defined as one of the three central obligations of the professoriate, the other two being research and service. It is explicitly upon these three activities that faculty are evaluated (by their peers, as well as by university administrators), and demonstrated competence in these three arenas is treated as essential to advancement. The exact status of teaching in this triune context varies from institution to institution and from field to field. Administrators of large universities tend to make a broad distinction between teaching-intensive disciplines (history, English, philosophy—though also much of psychology, economics, etc.) and the sciences (see SCIENCE). When such a typology is invoked, the latter term refers not to an epistemically distinct domain of activities (essentially all taught subjects within colleges and universities having come to adhere to a relatively homologous model of KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION), but rather to a subset of university departments in which the majority of faculty and graduate student labor is supported by large-scale research grants originating in government agencies, private foundations, and even commercial entities. Faculty in such a DEPARTMENT (paradigmatically physics, chemistry, biology, and the related biomedical sciences) do teach (meaning they enter classrooms and laboratories to assist undergraduates in attaining progressively higher degrees of competence in the relevant domain, doing so by means of lectures, problem sets, discussion, and guided hands-on investigation), but they tend, in the setting of research universities, to do much less of it than their colleagues in other departments (where external funding for research and graduate students is much less readily available). Teaching raises a number of challenging questions, the (temporary/contested/contingent) resolution of which effectively establishes the constitution of higher education as such in any given time and place: What should be taught? Who should teach it? To whom? How? In practice, however, the rise of a nearly universal conceptualization of knowledge as highly progressive (i.e., a commitment to the idea that domains of knowledge properly change continuously, forever renewing their form and content by means of internal dynamics that cause new and better knowledge to replace older and less good/powerful/useful/true knowledge [or even false knowledge, a.k.a. error]) has tended to place research (the pursuit of new and, therefore, notionally “better” knowledge) in an ever more prominent position within the culture of colleges and universities. Non-epistemic factors have contributed to this development—not least the discovery, during the Second World War, of the enormous practical (military, economic) potential of research in the sciences of matter, force, and life. The resulting influx of resources for basic and applied research in these areas into the institutions of higher education in the post-war period necessitated new socio-technical mechanisms for evaluation and assessment (notably systematic PEER REVIEW) as well as new administrative priorities and objectives. The status of teaching in such settings saw revision, as did many of the forms of academic life outside of the immediately affected subject areas, in that the new socio-technical and administrative mechanisms (together with the whole model of research-driven academic life) gradually came to play an increasingly prominent role across all academic disciplines. It is possible that teaching is an activity with stronger ties to self-formation than is commonly acknowledged, and that in some disciplinary domains (or, more generally, outside of specific disciplinary frames; see INTERDISCIPLINARITY) teaching should be understood as something other than the activity of conveying information, methods, skills, etc., and even, perhaps, as something inextricable from “soulcraft.” But the notion, whatever its virtue or appeal, is extremely difficult to activate meaningfully, and tends to emerge almost exclusively in reactionary and/or pathetic intellectual settings.