Encountering the Market

Non-academic, or Professional Services, staff comprise 46% of the University of St Andrews’ employees. Despite this, as a second-year student, I felt that my engagement with this significant portion of the University’s staff was limited. Thus, I sought to discover what insights would emerge from ethnographic encounters with them. With interlocutors' repeated references to students as ‘customers’ and the University as a ‘business,’ the project's focus soon became the marketization of UK higher education. This paper contributes to “critical anthropology of the neoliberal university” (Gusterson 2017) from the perspective of understudied non-academic university staff. It situates interviews and participant observation with non-academic staff at the University of St Andrews in the context of the increasingly marketized UK university. It proposes that due to marketization, a hierarchy of valuation arises across types of University staff based on their proximity to the student-customer, then concludes with reflections on how students might leverage their ‘consumer’ status to effect change in higher education.