If you were a lecturer at a research-focused institution, in which the quality of your teaching is a minor factor in your "success", and the social norm is mediocre teaching, would you teach at a high level?
Also, maybe the goal is to change the expectation that research universities lack good teachers? Public colleges educate many times more students than private ones, let alone small liberal arts schools.
Sometimes I ask the question, "What would I want if I were God of Everything?"
It makes sense to have elite universities, where the people who society will shove millions of dollars in grant money all go to get educated. And if I were God of Everything, I'd want them taught by excellent, dedicated educators. Right?
> "We explained to you before you accepted the position that the idea of employing a full-time lecturer is controversial in our department."
So the idea of employing a full-time lecturer seems quite appealing -- let the lecturers take care of all the boring crap like teaching freshmen how to integrate, and leave the research to the professors.
But wait! What if the university starts to figure out that they can get all their teaching done waaay more cheaply just by employing full-time lecturers? Professors have been doing well for the past few centuries by selling the idea that only a researcher is qualified to teach at the highest levels, and hence that they should be allowed to spend most of their time thinking about mathematics and only be obliged to teach a couple of classes a year. Full-time lecturers threaten not just the jobs of mathematics professors, but the entire future of global mathematics
So I can definitely sympathise with this view.