This paper addresses the ways in which the federal government in Mexico adopted travelling policies (i.e., forms of educational accountability derived from globalizing trends) to reconfigure the existing organizational and academic conditions of the public university during the late 1980s and 1990s. Although the process of university restructuring did not accomplish all expected goals, federal programs changed the landscape and practices within the academic profession. The influence of national programs upon academics’ everyday practices and self-understandings was more pronounced than other factors such as disciplinary specialization, departmental cultures, or institutional types (Clark, 2001). Faculty members shaped their identity and self-worth as professionals on the basis of their capacity to meet principles of accountability and bureaucratic administration required by federal programs. We argue that faculty members’ participation in federal programs was based on a sense of reluctant acceptance, which represents faculty members’ ambivalent views of federal policies, including faculty’s capacity to negotiate institutional and personal goals. Faculty members’ reluctant acceptance was part of the re-boundary work to shape their professional practice. Within the academic profession, faculty members had to decide, with limited support in their workplace, how to integrate personal and institutional projects.