'The question "what are universities for?" keeps returning, even though it has been often declared in media and policy that the university has now been irrevocably transformed into a market-oriented, entrepreneurial organization. Only, it has not - it keeps standing out as something not quite fitting into the picture. It is hard to tell what it produces and they do not have a bottomline (measurable profits). Academics keep engaging in activities that are not adapted to the new model: writing books, exchanging ideas, reflecting, questioning things taken-for-granted - such as the "new market-adapted university". The structures that are provided to them as their workplace, do not encourage, support or sometimes even tolerate the work that they do as an answer to a deeper need, or to the calling to be an academic. So many of them leave, including some of the best, most dedicated people. They disappear from the social stages. This book brings them up frontstage and offers them space to tell their stories, which is not only interesting and important from the point of view of the study of contemporary organizations and professions, but fundamental as a record if, at some point in history, the university is to be revived, regenerated and reconsidered as social institution with a mission and obligation towards the common good.

Leaving academia is not a failure for the protagonists of this book - it is a failure of the institution, as is witnessed by the fact that the stories of academics leaving academia form a pattern. Patterns are especially important in sociology, organization studies and in management: strong, recurrent patterns become structures. But academia is not just an institution, not just a profession and a calling but also a way of life, with a motto: everything can be a lesson. This is an important one - as well as a page turner of a book.'.