By the late 19th century, the new universities in the United States had become so closely intertwined with the research imperative that their future depended on their position at the center of knowledge creation. The tension between the liberal arts college and the "modern" research university initiated a process of differentiation that would define both institutions. The result was a system of hierarchical oppositions founded on the privileged institutional status of the new research university over the traditional liberal arts college: university vs. college; national vs. local; research vs. teaching; theory vs. practice, etc. The prevailing conception of writing as a set of skills, a tool of scientific method rather than an epistemic activity itself, helped to confine writing and rhetoric within the prepatory sphere of the degraded college. Ironically, the reorientation of some composition specialists from "hapless bottom feeders" to endowed chairs has come about through the acceptance of values, assumptions, and practices that have traditionally enforced the hierarchical oppositions sometimes deplored in rhetoric and composition. No longer can rhetoric and composition scholars look to the traditional literature/composition binary to explain the hierarchy of productivity in English departments because they themselves preserve and maintain the marginalization of teaching through the employment of professional criteria and the powerful, regulating force of academic authority, scholarly publishing. (Contains 12 references.) (TB)