Despite numerous federally and privately funded initiatives to improve teaching in colleges and universities, research-oriented institutions continue to undervalue scholarly teaching. In this qualitative study, the authors examined how scholarly teachers in a research-oriented institution develop and maintain a focus on teaching and learning. Data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 8 faculty identified as scholarly teachers, participant observation, and document analysis. The pursuit of scholarly teaching emerges as a struggle for scholarly legitimacy in the face of institutional constraints, faculty members' limited vision of the possible, and the difficult process of incorporating new ways of knowing into cultural norms.