ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the assertion that the modern university is the result of a process of accretion, as much as of evolution or reform. It deals with Scott that there has been a significant shift in the general conception of knowledge within Higher Education and proposes an underlying continuity. The chapter discusses the procedures and the culture of that Higher Education are two sides of the same coin; both bearing the stamp of institutional embodiment. Institutional embodiment locates normatively embodied subjects in the systems and architecture of social institutions. The chapter argues that most women academics experience an antinomy between their embodiment and various institutional practices; a dissonance. Tactics of exclusion have often been linked to attempts to maintain an ideal pure community. This tactic was successful in the cloistered university until the civil rights movement, when a general liberalisation of opportunity forced the fraternity to open the gates protecting the Athenian democracy.
