Since the 1960s, many profession-oriented domains such as nursing, social work and education have entered universities. The article focuses on a controversy in one profession-oriented discipline, nursing science during the 1990s. The aim is to understand the discipline and to highlight its characteristics in a controversy situation. The article is rooted in science and technology studies which have focused on controversies in science. The article first discusses what nursing science was like as an arena of controversy and what made it controversy-prone in the 1990s. It then analyses which actors took part in the controversy in this profession-oriented discipline, and what the different actors' goals were for nursing science. The aim is to understand the discipline and to highlight its characteristics in a controversy situation. In this way, the article produces understanding of this and other profession-oriented disciplines in the academic setting.