Reasons for an academic to need administrator rights on work computer Questions related to this in a not specifically academic setting have been asked elsewhere, notably Should developers have administrator permissions on their PC? and Should dev be admin on their computer? My question relates to my job as an academic at a (UK) university. 

I moved to using Linux at work so that I did not have to have my computer managed by my university's IT service. This is purely because they are poorly resourced/managed and so addressing small problems takes a very long time. I might, for example, have to wait several weeks for a piece of (free) software to be installed. This imposes unacceptable (to me) delays on my research. They are now changing University policy such that all PCs connected to the network are managed by IT (reasonable), backed-up (reasonable) and local admin privileges are restricted to those who can demonstrate a genuine need for them (reasonable, but I am unwilling to go back to not being able to make progress because of them).

I am confident that one way and another in the end I can persuade them of my need -- but I would like to avoid the delays, meetings, and aggravation this will involve.

What are good, unarguable reasons, that I might need local admin rights. I'm currently thinking 'compiling code written by my co-author' but I might need something more concrete. They will not know enough about my research to know what I might actually need or not.
So far, I have only come across one reason for needing something close to administrator rights on a fixed department machine: using scientific software.

When you start using a new scientific piece of software, you often have its source code, and need to build it first. Typically, there is no documentation of what exact packages in your Linux distribution are needed (as this changes over time, and there are many Linux distributions as well). So the process is:


Try to build
Identify the cause of error (installing new software, updating the compiler, ...)
Fixing the cause of error (requires administrator rights
Repeat steps 1-3 many times until done.


You can only move towards the respective next issue when one has been resolved. It is unrealistic to assume that you can give an admin a list of required packages upfront, 

Without admin rights and an admin reaction time of, say, ~6 hours, this process may easily take a week. With admin rights, the process will be much faster.

BTW: When you start using scientific software professionally, there may be more packages that you need to install (LaTeX, screen, ...), so the process continues.

If you tell the IT people that this is the (unavoidable) process with most scientific software, and you will need to work with ~10 such tools during your PhD, then you should have a good point. On a technical level, there may also be the possibility for "admin light" access, namely by whitelisting your username for "sudo"ing a package installation request. Perhaps that is an option as well in your case.