This article explores the anxieties and political struggles around the professionalisation of academic development in contemporary universities. It seeks to go beyond the work of classification and categorisation of "roles and identities" of academic developers with its attendant oppositional or conciliatory metaphors, to re-describe the contemporary field of academic development in universities through an ironic lens. We work with Foucault's notion of "games of truth and error" and Rorty's scholarship of "re-description" in an attempt to tell the contradictions and tensions of the field more effectively. We discuss the implications that arise from these for academic development to engage productively in the ongoing reinvention of the academy. (Contains 1 table and 1 note.)