Our study explores the relationship between values and academic identity in the public university. Framing the study is the proposition public universities face academic identity tensions arising from pressures to combine and sustain competing and contradictory managerial (economic) and academic (professional) values systems. Academic responses to an online survey indicated professors and lecturers shared a deep-seated antipathy to a market ethos that reduces higher education to a narrow economic function. Implications and challenges associated with academic identity tensions are considered.