Abstract: Along with the acceleration of constructing first-class universities or disciplines, growing emphasis are placed to research output of teachers, and the “paper-oriented” evaluation system has become dominant in a great number of universities, which guides teachers' efforts more on research than on teaching. How to keep an equal emphasis on teaching and research in universities has aroused widespread concern in the academic circles. The institutional theory provides a starting point for researching and understanding from the perspective of organizational environment. After analyzing the basic functions of university under the institutional theory, the author finds that: first, the teaching function of universities meets the legitimacy requirements of the institutional environment, matches with the concerns of the government, society, parents and students, and is necessary to level up the talent cultivation. The research function is the product of pursuing efficiency standard in the technological environment. The research and knowledge innovation carried out by universities accelerates regional economic development, and the papers (books or textbooks) published by teachers are easy to quantify in the educational evaluation system, which can be seen as university's choice to comply with the principles of technological environment. Secondly, university organizations prioritizing research are facing the imbalance between teaching and research, which originated from the pressure of ranking from outside as well as that of research competition within the organization. The administrators and academics in universities have strong heterogeneity in the attitudes to research and publication, various policies and incentives to maximize performance are made to mobilize the teachers' potential motivation in research, and the incentive mode is especially effective for young teachers. As for competition within the organization, research evaluation is not only the need of universities to realize legitimacy, but also the need of competitive mechanism for establishing secondary colleges. Third, under the guidance of Pareto's improvement method, we should establish the rules of organizational representation, resource redistribution, teaching authority, and the ideal state of equal emphasis on teaching and research. Universities should make full use of the accumulated research resources, promote the transformation of research achievements to serve teaching, narrow the gap between teaching and research to an acceptable level, and respect the inner inherent differences between teaching and research output as well as their operation rules.

Key words: universities, equal emphasis on teaching and research, institutional theory, research framework