Objective: to analyze university teaching in nursing from an institutional dialectic approach. Method: a qualitative research based on Institutional Socioclinics. Eighteen nursing professors from four regions of Brazil and from six public institutions of higher education participated. For data production, interviews, observations, documentary analyses, individual and collective restitution and use of the research diary were performed. Data was organized for analysis by transcription/translation, recomposition/rearrangement, and final reconstruction/narration. Data analysis was produced from analyzers, based on Socioclinics, Institutional Analysis current of thought, and on the qualitative mode of analysis by questioning and writing. Results: two main analyzers made the institution ‘teaching in higher education and the nursing professor’ emerge: time-money relation and resistance. Teaching time, increasingly associated with money, in managerialist logic, has formatted the nursing professors as passive subjects in the production of knowledge, induced by the evaluation model of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Level Personnel and its link to the progression in the university career. In this model, the nursing professor is driven to devote more to research than to teaching. This interferes with teaching conceptions and practices, which are more influenced by managerialism and less grounded in pedagogical theories. Resistance against this model has not yet encountered coping mechanisms. Conclusion: from the analysis produced with the participants, the choices of the nursing professor are so much more grounded in managerialism and so much less based on pedagogical references, especially those arising from dialectical theories. In this sense, resistance is transformed into a movement of adaptation.