The traditional view of the university administrator is someone engaged in disinterested processing in the civil service tradition, playing a supporting role to academic staff. In recent years, the term ‘professional services’ has been introduced to describe the activities of non-academic staff engaged in the administration and management of English universities. It could be argued that this is long overdue and simply rectifying earlier injustices; alternatively, it could be viewed as symptomatic of a reconstitution of relations between academics and administrators in which the latter have begun to ‘carve out critical space’ in universities, and, at senior levels, move into roles previously reserved for senior academics (Szekeres, 2011:679).There has been little acknowledgement of the repositioning of professional administrators and managers in higher education, nor broader consideration of the implications. This study addresses these gaps in the literature. It queries whether the organisational professionalism of administrators and occupational professionalism of academics are dichotomous, gauges the state of academic / administrator relations, and explores the implications of the continued professionalisation of the administration in English universities. Does the professionalisation of the administrator herald the deprofessionalisation of the don?