Many post-secondary institutions in Canada over the past decade have made the transition from college to university status. The researchers on this team were hired in the midst of such a transition at one western Canadian institution. As new faculty we were navigating the normal tides of adjusting to a new faculty position, but our induction occurred in a shifting institutional context. Our research question, "What is the new faculty experience in a transitional institution?" guided a five-year focused ethnography, beginning as a self-study of the research team and expanding into 60 interviews with 31 participants over several years. The results demonstrate that a more complex theory is required to reflect the experience of new faculty than has appeared previously in the literature. We propose a framework of competing discourses.