Reflection on Ros Seyd’s ‘breaking down barriers’: from misunderstandings to structural design faults

This paper revisits Ros Seyd's [2000. “Breaking down Barriers: The Administrator and the Academic.” Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education 4 (2): 35–37] reflections on the academic-professional divide to argue that what has often been framed as a cultural or relational issue is, in contemporary universities, more accurately understood as a problem of employment design. Drawing on ecological perspectives on the university, it challenges binary classifications and highlights the epistemic contributions of professional, technical, and third space actors whose boundary-crossing work increasingly sustains institutional capability. Examining employment architectures, the paper argues how these institutionalise unequal expectations of professional becoming and recognition. These structures constrain adaptive capacity and undermine institutional sustainability. Reframing the divide as structural rather than interpersonal shifts attention from goodwill to management and suggests that addressing entrenched inequities requires coherent, role-aligned employment principles capable of recognising diverse forms of knowledge production within an ecological university.