The Professional Toolkit
My barber recently moved premises, set up on his own, and I found something genuinely compelling about that. The ability, as a professional, to essentially pick up your tools, find a new chair, and keep going. The skill is his. The relationship with his clients is his. The craft he's spent years developing is entirely portable. If a landlord puts the rent up, or an employer devalues his labour, he has real options. He can leave.
It got me thinking about what that actually looks like in a university context – and how unevenly that kind of portability is distributed. It also started me thinking about my new role, and what it feels like coming into somewhere new and different, even within the same organisation.
The Academic Exception
On the surface, academics seem like the university equivalent of the barber. And in some ways they are. A researcher builds a body of work that belongs to them, not the institution. Their reputation is individual and travels with them. Their relationships in their discipline usually span institutions and continents. Their publications, their intellectual contributions – these are genuinely portable in a way that most professional roles aren't. There's a reason academic recruitment looks the way it does: you're hiring a person and everything they've built, not just filling a seat.
But even this has limits. The infrastructure that supports academic work – the labs, research funding, relationships, administrative machinery that keeps everything running – none of that moves. And increasingly, the conditions under which academic work happens are so shaped by institutional systems and processes that the portability is more theoretical than real for many people working in that space.
The Machine Operators
The more interesting case, though, is that of professional staff – the people who actually run the mechanisms and systems of universities. And I include myself in this.
My role exists within a specific institutional machine, and I'd say I've become quite good at operating that machine. I understand its quirks, knowing which levers do what and in what order, but that expertise is deeply contextual to my machine. Even if another university runs what looks like the same machine, it's a different model, configured differently, embedded in a different culture, connected to different systems. The skills transfer is partial at best. It's not rolling up the tools and finding a new chair. It's starting again with a machine you've never operated, drawing on instincts developed elsewhere and hoping they're close enough.
This isn't unique to universities, or even to professional services roles. It's become the dominant shape of work across most industries – we've shifted from developing craft to developing operational knowledge of specific systems. The machine changes, the knowledge doesn't travel.
What makes this particularly interesting in a university context is the gap it creates between the two main workforces. Academics are, at least in principle, developing and owning portable human capabilities – that's more or less the point of the work. Professional staff are frequently doing the opposite: becoming more specialised, more institutionally embedded, more dependent on the specific machine they operate. The longer you stay, the better you get, and the harder it becomes to leave on your own terms.
What Do You Actually Own?
This is the question the barber analogy keeps pushing me toward. What do you actually own, as a worker?
The barber owns the skill. It lives in his hands, his judgement, his years of practice. No employer can take that from him.
The academic, at their best, owns a body of work and the reputation that comes with it. That's real capital, even if the conditions for producing it are increasingly constrained.
The professional staff member – and I'm talking about myself here – often owns neither. What they own is deep knowledge of a specific machine in a specific place. That has real value, but it's value that mostly accrues to the institution rather than to the person. And it puts the person in a more precarious position than the income we get paid might suggest.
There's a provocation in here that I haven't fully resolved. Universities are, nominally, in the business of developing human capability – portable, transferable, genuinely owned by the person who develops it. That's the promise at the heart of the enterprise. And yet the professional workforce that makes universities function has largely been built on the opposite principle: people trained to be indispensable to a machine rather than to move independently through the world.
I don't think that's intentional. But I do think it's worth naming.