Non-academic staff’s part in transforming academia: as irrelevant as their label suggests?

Transformations in higher education systems have put heightened and often ambiguous demands on universities. As the professoriate was reluctant to take up the associated tasks, these became formalized as the primary tasks of new types of non-academic staff. We illuminate how external pressures resulted in a new and more amenable organizational layer, composed of degree-holding professionals and managers, taking Denmark as a case. This layer has steadily grown and branched out at the expense of traditional clerical and technical support functions. To indicate the workings of this surging layer, we highlight recent empirical studies of degree-holding professionals in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands. We find that their competences, relationships, and influence on strategy and daily management enable some of them to be actors of transformations themselves and to strengthen the influence of other non-academic actors in the system. Hence, we conclude that the surge of degree-holding professionals is not only a result of transformations; it simultaneously has unsung potential to drive further and deeper transformations.