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Early in my academic career, I received a piece of advice that I have never quite forgotten. I had received a few teaching awards and proudly added them to my CV. A senior colleague looked over the document and gently suggested that I remove them.The reasoning was simple: teaching awards might make it look like I wasn’t a serious researcher.The logic behind the advice was not unusual. In many research universities, there is an unspoken hierarchy of academic value. Research sits at the top. Grants, books, and journal articles signal seriousness. Teaching, by contrast, is often treated as something secondary—a duty rather than a scholarly accomplishment. A teaching award, in this logic, signals that you spend too much time in the classroom and not enough time producing research.What struck me even then was the implication behind the advice. It assumed that excellence in teaching and excellence in research exist in tension with one another. If you are recognized as a good teacher, the assumption goes, you must be neglecting the work that truly counts. As the author of three books—two of which are published by Cambridge University Press—with a fourth on the way, I reject this premise. In my own work on early Christianity, teaching has never been separate from research. Explaining Gregory of Nazianzus (my personal favourite) to students forces clarity about arguments that can otherwise remain comfortably obscure. Students ask questions that expose assumptions. They notice ambiguities that scholars sometimes overlook. Again and again, the classroom becomes a place where ideas are re-examined.Teaching is not the absence of scholarship. It is one of the places where scholarship happens.There is also something revealing about the warning itself. Early-career-scholars—especially women—often receive subtle signals about what kinds of work will be taken seriously. Mentoring students and investing in pedagogy can be quietly coded as “soft” labour. The message is not always explicit, but it is clear enough: if you want to be seen as a real scholar, do not look too invested in teaching or in your students.The irony is that universities depend on that very labour. Students do not encounter research outputs directly; they encounter them through teaching. The classroom is where the intellectual traditions of a discipline are actually transmitted. To treat excellence in teaching as a sign of diminished scholarly seriousness misunderstands how academic life works.I did not remove the teaching awards from my CV.The advice was offered with genuine care—but the premise behind it is broken. The problem is not that teaching awards appear on a CV. The problem is the academic culture that once made many scholars think they should not.