Harvard is somewhat peculiar in the way it selects and impresses upon faculty the importance of teaching. That's not to say that all Harvard professors are great teachers, but there's certainly an emphasis on it that is less common.
But yes, the general state of things at virtually all universities (except community colleges) is that teaching is very much secondary to research, and as a result, as the book Academically Adrift summarizes, is that a big proportion of students learn very little in college: "45 percent of students 'did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning' during the first two years of college. 36 percent of students 'did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning' over four years of college." http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_la...
I went digging for any example of a course that made a dent in student retention, and I found two courses, one on learning & motivation strateges, and another on math for engineers: http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/two-courses-that-m...
And coincidentally both required hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money to develop - the latter one 5 million dollars in NSF funds.
>>>6 years ago there was an initiative at Harvard to focus on teaching and not just research, but I don't know what came of it.
This is actually fascinating to me. I attended a large Midwestern college in the late 1990's and contemplated a career in academia. At the time, there was a huge debate over the effectiveness of tenure.
By the time I graduated, the normal "right of passage" of getting tenure had turned into a multi-year process which focused entirely on what research you had conducted, the amount of money you were bringing into the school, how many articles you had published, how current those articles were, etc. It had absolutely nothing to do with how good of a teacher you were - and everything to do with how much research you were doing and where your articles were published.
Needless to say, I opted not to enter academia, mainly for this reason. Tenure became the carrot they dangled out in front of you so you'd bust your ass for the university while not receiving much in return. As one long tenured professor told me, "They've turned tenure from something that was seen as prestigious, into a mafia racket."
