Some of the most enduring, and engaging, questions within academic librarianship are those about students and research skills. The vocabulary employed for discussion has evolved, but essential questions--what skills do students need to be taught, who should teach them, and how?--have persisted from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first. This article examines current and historical aspects of these questions, with special focus on an extended early twentieth-century debate between librarian John Cotton Dana and Vassar College history professor Lucy Maynard Salmon about who should provide library instruction: librarians or professors? (Contains 4 figures and 59 notes.)