This article has four aims. The first is to characterize the key features of speech-act theory, and, in particular, to show that there is a genuine distinction between the sound uttered when someone is speaking (locution), the effect the speech has (perlocution) and the very "act" of speaking (the illocution). Secondly, it aims to demonstrate that illocutionary speech-acts are an integral part of higher education, and thirdly, to specify the conditions under which agents are unable to perform certain speech-acts. Finally, the article argues that these conditions can be found within higher education, and hence students and lecturers are often unable to perform certain speech-acts. It is not the aim of this article to suggest that silencing and power, understood in this way, is an exhaustive conceptual tool kit for understanding the student experience. It is not. However, such a way of conceptualizing the student experience may have some interesting and novel, explanatory and prescriptive, payoff.