Cite as: 511 U. S. 571 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
rial employees are excluded from the Act's coverage. Id., at 283 ("so clearly outside the Act that no specific exclusionary provision was thought necessary"). The Board in Yeshiva argued that the faculty members were not managerial, contending that faculty authority was "exercised in the faculty's own interest rather than in the interest of the university." 444 U. S., at 685. To support its position, the Board placed much reliance on the faculty members' independent professional role in designing the curriculum and in discharging their professional obligations to the students. We found the Board's reasoning unpersuasive:
"In arguing that a faculty member exercising independent judgment acts primarily in his own interest and therefore does not represent the interest of his employer, the Board assumes that the professional interests of the faculty and the interests of the institution are distinct, separable entities with which a faculty member could not simultaneously be aligned. The Court of Appeals found no justification for this distinction, and we perceive none. In fact, the faculty's professional interests—as applied to governance at a university like Yeshiva—cannot be separated from those of the institution.
". . . The 'business' of a university is education." Id., at 688.
The Board's reasoning fares no better here than it did in Yeshiva. As in Yeshiva, the Board has created a false dichotomy—in this case, a dichotomy between acts taken in connection with patient care and acts taken in the interest of the employer. That dichotomy makes no sense. Patient care is the business of a nursing home, and it follows that attending to the needs of the nursing home patients, who are the employer's customers, is in the interest of the employer. See Beverly California, supra, at 1553. We thus see no basis for the Board's blanket assertion that supervisory au-
577
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