Teaching and research don't have to battle each other for graduate students' attention. In an essay in Peter C. Herman's "Day Late, Dollar Short: The Next Generation and the New Academy", published in 2000, English professor Sharon O'Dair makes the connection between the current situation of English graduate students and the delusions of young basketball players with "hoop dreams" who commit themselves to the impossible goal of becoming stars in the National Basketball Association. Pressured to publish earlier, English graduate teaching assistants, most of whom want to be professors of literature, are, as former Modern Language Association president Robert Scholes admits in "Profession 2004", "generally overworked, under-compensated, and trained for jobs that just aren?t there." Many are forced to become "freeway flyers," teaching section upon section of composition on multiple campuses, with no hope of advancement, their "lit dreams" shattered. This article evaluates this issue in the following sections: Beyond the Rhetoric of Support; and Unproductive Split. It concludes that a curriculum that better represents and enacts the relationship between teaching and scholarship in the profession; that attempts to unify rather than separate teachers' scholarly and pedagogical responsibilities; that takes professional development, including teachers' work as teachers, seriously should not only help teachers recruit quality graduate students, but also better enable teachers to insist on reduced loads and higher pay for this expertise, both in the university granting the PhD and in the marketplace that efforts such as the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate hope to transform.