East Asian higher education has experienced an important shift by it's national universities to pay increasing attention to rankings in the wake of globalization. This critical feature influences inter-university competition for resources, faculty and students. During this process, these universities have restructured their organizations and reshaped academic work. Singapore's own journey into the higher education restructuring process took a decisive step in 2005 with the corporatization of its three universities, the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Singapore Management University (SMU). Since it has been about ten years since the corporatization, this paper provides an assessment of the progress of this venture, and examines, through a survey, the perceptions of professors from NUS and NTU with regard to their work and their university.