In recent years, anxiety and distress among academic staff regarding Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) have become increasingly visible, reflecting the detrimental effects of these evaluations on lecturers’ quality of life and their central role within contemporary regimes of institutional pressure in higher education. Empirical research demonstrates that anonymous student comments significantly increase workplace stress and negatively affect well-being, with early-career academics being particularly vulnerable (Lakeman et al., 2022). At the same time, systematic reviews show that SETs are deeply shaped by sexist, racist, and other prejudicial biases that disproportionately disadvantage women and minoritized instructors (Adams et al., 2021; Deo, 2015; Gatwiri et al., 2021; Heffernan, 2022). Despite this growing body of literature, relatively little research situates these harms within the broader structural transformations associated with neoliberalization in higher education or examines their implications for academic subjectivity.

This study addresses this gap by examining how Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) function as mechanisms of subject formation within the neoliberal academy. Drawing on the authors’ personal narratives, the study employs academic autoethnography (Ellis, 2004; Adams et al., 2015) to reflect on their experiences as lecturers in an Israeli higher education institution. This approach enables a critical examination of how neoliberal organizational shifts are lived, felt, and internalized, foregrounding the affective and embodied dimensions of evaluation regimes. The analysis is informed by scholarship on neoliberalization processes in higher education, characterized by the expansion of audit culture and measurement regimes that increasingly shape institutional ethos, organizational practices, and lecturers’ everyday working conditions (Boring et al., 2016; Hou et al., 2017; López-Castellano, 2024; Mickey et al., 2022). Within this context, SETs operate not only as tools for assessing teaching quality but also as managerial instruments that regulate conduct, distribute vulnerability, and recalibrate professional worth. Qualitative research has conceptualized SETs as a “game” that lecturers must strategically navigate, embedding them within regimes of surveillance, judgment, and anticipatory self-monitoring (Crimmins et al., 2024).

These processes are theorized through the concept of affective subjectivation (Crimmins et al., 2024; Valero et al., 2019), understood as a form of neoliberal governmentality through which academics internalize standards of productivity, performativity, and emotional regulation. Under these conditions, lecturers are compelled to perform the figure of the omnipotent, ever-productive academic subject, often at significant personal and professional cost. The authors’ autoethnographic narratives foreground these costs, illuminating how SETs shape pedagogical practices as well as self-perception, affective life, and intellectual labor.

Situated within the Israeli higher education context, the study contributes a qualitative, reflexive perspective to existing debates on evaluation, inequality, and neoliberal governance in academia. By centering lived experience and affective labor, it offers a critical rethinking of SETs as technologies that do more than measure teaching and actively shape what it feels like and what it means to be a “good” academic teacher under neoliberal conditions.

Our autoethnographic approach emerges from a feminist praxis that Sara Ahmed (2017, p. 21) defines as “a sensible reaction to the injustices of the world.” Such a response foregrounds storytelling as a critical practice for contesting power relations and exposing forms of oppression. In applying this perspective to our engagement with one another, we adopt a collective stance that resists the individualistic and individualising logics of an increasingly neoliberal academy. Rather than treating experience as private or isolated, we position it as relational, shared, and politically meaningful. Methodologically, we work through collaborative autoethnography, a form of inquiry that enables us to share, discuss, and analyse memories in dialogue. Autoethnography has been theorised as a mode of autobiographical research that situates personal experience within broader cultural, social, and political contexts. Heewon Chang (2008, 2011) defines it as a research method that draws on researchers’ own life stories as socioculturally embedded data, allowing for an understanding of society through the situated lens of the self. Similarly, Ellis (2004) emphasises that autoethnography centres on a particular self, or aspects of a life, lived in cultural context. Building on this tradition, we employ collaborative autoethnography, defined by Chang et al. (2013) as the joint production of autoethnographic accounts by several researchers situated within a shared sociocultural milieu, in our case, academia. Through the collective gathering, sharing, and interpretation of autobiographical materials, we generate deeper insights into neoliberal academia as a global cultural formation (Chang, 2008, 2011; Blalock & Akehi, 2017). Coming from different disciplines and experiential locations, our narratives articulate multiple perspectives on neoliberal cultural scripts and on the forms of structural and systematic oppression they reproduce. Beyond its analytic value, collaborative autoethnography functions as a practice of community building. It fosters trust, deep listening, creativity, and collegial forms of feedback and mentorship (Lapadat, 2017; Chang et al., 2013). In this sense, and in line with other feminist collective academic projects, we understand our work as a radical act of resistance to competitive and hegemonic academic discourses (Brooks et al., 2017; Charteris et al., 2016; Hernandez et al., 2015). Our exchanges culminated in three dialogic texts, which we subsequently analysed. Through this process, we develop empirical and theoretical insights into the effects of neoliberal sensibilities on academic subjectivities, well-being, and professional practice.

By exploring the impact of evaluations on well-being and professional relationships, this collaborative autoethnography deepens our understanding of academic life within the neoliberal academy. Engaging with this study through a reflexive methodology allows us to reclaim our agency while resisting processes of neoliberalization within an increasingly metrics-driven environment.

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