Higher education has been subject to substantial reforms as new forms of performance management (PM) are implemented in universities. Extant research suggests that in many cases PM systems have disrupted academic life. We complement this literature with an extensive mixed methods study of how the PM system is understood by academics across universities and departments in a specific socio-cultural setting and at a time when new management principles and practices are being forcefully introduced. We focus on how scholars make sense of the change in terms of what is measured, by whom, and how, what the assumptions that underlie PM are, and what kind of a university ideal is created in and through PM. Most significantly, we highlight how the proliferation of performance management can be seen as a catalyst for changing the very ethos of what it is to be an academic and to do academic work.