Nothing evokes my ire more than the phrase "research university" used nowadays to characterize institutions of higher learning such as Berkeley. Of course they are research universities. That's like saying "a round ball." First and foremost they are educational institutions. Their faculty does research because graduate education is research education. Unfortunately, with declining economic resources and the unwillingness to recognize that the university has developed "champagne tastes with a beer income," increasingly our institution has confused product for process and has turned to this "research" emphasis as a mode of generating funds, a perspective with which I seriously disagree.

I have never seen a boundary between my teaching and my research. They are mutually and reciprocally stimulating. I am a better teacher because I do research and because I can give personal insights into the subject matter that simply would not be the same if I had depended only on secondary sources for this information. Similarly, being a teacher gives my research a better perspective and helps me to place the more detailed aspects of what I do in the broader context of knowledge in my field. Moreover, when I am writing scientific papers, I am teaching the same way I teach in the classroom. It is just that most of my audience are professional biologists, although that distinction also becomes blurred because many advanced students read my papers as well.

My research perspective also has an impact on the organization and teaching of my discipline, plant morphology. Traditionally, in this country plant morphology has been presented as a systematic survey of the major groups of the plant kingdom. The emphasis has been more on cataloging and memorization than on analysis and the application of concepts. Unhappy with this approach, I went back to the classic literature and taught myself a more analytical perspective on the field. Not only did it significantly alter my approach to my teaching, but also my approach to research. Thus, rather than having students memorize the diversity of plants, we use that diversity to deduce the most fundamental common principles, and we test the application of those concepts with "anonymous" plant materials so that students are never able to memorize to pass tests. This concept application mode is further reinforced by having them do an independent research project for a term paper in which they apply the concepts from the course to an unidentified plant. Students wind up combining research and teaching in the very course they are taking and emerge from it with a way of looking at plants that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

Finally, I should emphasize that the most important message I can convey to students is a genuine sense of wonder about the biological world and my insatiable curiosity about it. As a scientist I think of myself not as a controller of nature, but merely an observer and interpreter of it. I am really just a voice for the plants. Since the plants cannot speak, I speak for them. Hence what is important is not what I say, but what the plants do. I should be relatively transparent in the process. Viewing my research and teaching in this light helps me to avoid the egocentricities that dog our science today. It also reinforces the view that the role of botany is to help humans to better fit into the broader fabric of nature rather than to bend nature to our own selfish needs. With declining economic resources and, hopefully, the return to a more balanced view of teaching and research, my values could become more general and we might finally cease to call the university a "research institution."