The purpose of this article is to describe the composition and internal stratification of the university teaching staff at Swedish higher education institutions. We show that four fault lines shape the higher education field in the 21st century. These are, firstly, the resource hierarchies both between old and new higher education institutions and between the fields of science, and, secondly, the prestige hierarchy between research and teaching staff categories and between the senior lecturers’conditions of existence in the center of the system and its periphery. We argue that it is necessary to analyze how these stratification lines have come into place to understand how they work and interact with each other, and how they have partially reinforced each other, but at the same time have left room for a transformation of the university teachers’ conditions across the university system.