One of the fundamental tasks of sociology as a discipline is to empirically describe and theoretically explain institutional change. The subjects as well as the explanatory frameworks are diverse. A particular challenge is the analysis of those institutions with which one is directly familiar. For a scholar, such an institution is certainly the university, which, to anticipate the core thesis of Frank Meier, is increasingly being transformed into a unified and organized actor within the framework of general processes of societal structural constitution. Developing this thesis theoretically and illuminating it empirically is neither simple nor trivial. It is not simple because the analysis of the university requires a high degree of self-distance from the researcher, precisely due to its grounding in their everyday experiences.