ABSTRACT
It is an attempt to assess the implications of current boundary pressures on the professoriate and upon academic leadership. In organizational terms, the resilience of the American university, its ability to adapt and occasionally to change given alterations in its environment, might best be characterized as a function of the careful management of institutional boundaries. The breakdown of the institutional division of labor that in Veblen's era assigned border-crossing activities to a limited number of units, professional schools, extension departments, and the like has also affected those who have been well protected and buffered. At the institutional level, managing boundaries has become increasingly about managing the way individual faculty spend their time, never the easiest of propositions. At the individual level, the multiple and competing demands on faculty time produce a situation in which faculty feel increasingly schizophrenic. Especially in professional schools, faculty are torn between responsibilities to their research, responsibilities to their students, and responsibilities to their professional colleagues.
