Question: **tl;dr**

Faculty don't think teaching is as important as their other responsibilities; how do we change that?

**Long version**

I've been working in academia for a long time and whenever I see instructors half-assing their teaching the go to excuses are that they have no time, or that it doesn't get any respect/grants/promotion/tenure/etc. I don't doubt they're busy, and I know departments don't typically reward teaching excellence (or punish teaching mediocrity...) but the students are suffering as a result.

How can we (faculty that care about teaching and staff supporting faculty) change this situation? What can we do short-term to make faculty care about teaching *now* and what can we do long-term to make departments care about excellence in teaching, and not just in research?

*Note:* I'm aware research brings in money. Keep in mind most faculty are adjuncts who aren't doing research but still have tenured research faculty that don't care about teaching as their role models.

Answer: 
Putting in place a better system for evaluating teaching than today's student evaluation forms would be a good start. Getting serious about the assessment of student learning outcomes (rather than simply assigning grades) would also be extremely helpful.
In a nutshell: **Competition** between departments
for students and funding
can be one of the important reasons
to cause departments to care about the quality of teaching.

I give the following anecdote to illustrate the above principle.

In my undergrad institution,
which is outside the US and is fairly large (~30 K undergrads),
the introductory math classes taken by engineering students
were taught by professors in the math department.

I had heard from people in the math department that
some in the engineering department
wanted to teach the classes themselves,
so as to gain more funding and be able to hire more headcount (faculty).
Because the math department did not want to
lose this funding and headcount to the engineering department
they sent their best teaching professors to teach the intro math courses.
This allowed the math department to defend their position and say,
"We're doing a good job teaching this course,
as evidenced by good teaching evaluations,
so why should you rock the boat?"