aster Teacher John Buck was described in our September issue as "known for exciting students" yet "more concerned with how students excite him." We aspire to a similar relationship with our readers.

A few wrote to us in praise of the article "The Lesson of the Lock," saying "I learned something" and "He exemplifies the person essential to a university that values teaching." Others expressed their opinions in person: One administrator suggested a film be made of great teachers teaching, another harrumphed at the description of "duck-footed" Buck, while a third suggested the magazine "might do more of it." A member of the Society of Teaching Award Recipients noted Buck had "published a lot in the minds of young people." Another faculty member wondered if the editor of Research/Penn State had another jog lined up, which would have been funny if two professors had not already returned their copies of the magazine to our publisher calling his attention to "The Lesson of the Lock" as an act of sabotage.

The definition of "research" can be troublesome to a University magazine bearing it in its title. The word’s edges need to blur to accommodate corn-soup recipes, organ recitals, heath-care demographics, noctolucent clouds, and the time-of-flight atom-probe field ion microscope. In fact, for all the magazine’s 12 years we have blithely defined "research" in-house, as "whatever the professors are doing when they’re not teaching."

We were wrong. The lesson in "The Lesson of the Lock" is that we need to redefine the "research" of our title.

"To be a good teacher," says Buck, "means accommodating the current condition of your discipline to the current condition of your students. Research is essential to teaching because what you’re teaching is the subject as we know it now. If I taught the Pope that I has learned, the Pope wouldn’t address my classes at all. What you want to say to your students is that Pope can still enter the eyes of the 20^th century. That’s what literary criticism does. It makes the past speak to now, intensely.

"That’s why you can’t be a good teacher and not be a scholar. You would betray your class."

This concept of Scholar-Teacher, from Ernest Boyer’s 1990 Scholarship Reconsidered, informs both the 1991 report of the University Faculty Senate’s Task Force on Undergraduate Education and Provost John Brighton’s October 1991 remarks to the Faculty Senate. "The time has come to move beyond the tired old teaching versus research debate," Brighton quotes Boyer. "Scholarship means engaging in original research. But the work of the scholar also means stepping back from one’s investigation, looking for connections, building bridges between theory and practice, and communicating one’s knowledge effectively to one’s students."

The Task Force on Undergraduate Education agrees. "By definition," their report notes, "faculty are professors of scholarship both to their peers, by means of published research, and to those uninitiated on their disciplines, by means of teaching." Scholarship, the Task Force believes, "is needed for both the extension of knowledge and the instruction of students. This understanding undercuts the assumption that research and teaching reside in mutually exclusive, if not antagonistic worlds. It also suggests that scholarship, rather than research, is the more fundamental and useful category for appreciating the integrated nature of faculty activities and for determining an individual’s overall contributions."

We’d hate to change our logo — Scholarship/Penn State would stretch our cover size two inches — yet Boyer’s larger "scholarship" well fits the contents of this magazine. We never considered John Buck the first Scholar-Teacher to appear in Research/Penn State We believe all the researchers we have written about deserve that appellation: Each managed to teach us (journalists and generalists all) his or her latest discoveries in fields as specialized and abstruse as vulcanology, semiotics, and evolutionary biology — and to teach us well enough that we could pass the lessons on to your readers, our students.