The University as it is Commonly Understood by University Professors

The social sciences attempt to recover the importance of the social actor, and from his perspective it is possible to understand the organization of which he forms a part. The university is one of these organizations in which professors, as social actors, construct the institution on a daily basis, expressing it in their conception of university, their attitude towards the university, and their vision of the future of the institution. To discover the form in which from their perspective, the professors at the University of Zulia elaborate and express according to their common viewpoint their social representation of the institution is achieved through analysis of qualitative information obtained from a questionaire applied to a sample of the professors at said university. The analysis of this information permits us to conclude that there are three tipified figures of university professors, based on their patterns of interpretation of the university: the expert, the intellectual, and the agent.