For the better part of a decade, universities have described themselves as civic institutions. The vocabulary has become almost standard, running through the anchor institution, the place-based partner and the organisation rooted in and responsible to the community around it. Formal civic agreements have been signed in considerable numbers, each restating a shared commitment to the economic, social and cultural life of a locality. The language is attractive and has been adopted with relatively little friction, in part because it asks for a statement of values before asking for much else. What has been rarer is the moment at which that statement is tested against something an institution must actually do.
That moment may now be closer than it was. A good deal of regeneration funding is being consolidated and placed in the hands of local and regional authorities, to be directed according to local priorities rather than distributed centrally against national formulae. The sums involved are not trivial, though the discretion attached to them is the more significant feature. Where funds are held locally and allocated to projects that local leaders judge worthwhile, the institutions best placed to benefit are those that can present themselves as credible partners in a particular place, with something concrete to offer and the capacity to see it through. A civic identity, in other words, is beginning to acquire a price, and with it a test.
The ease of the claim
It is worth being honest about how cheaply the civic identity has often been held. A commitment to place can be written into a strategy, affirmed in an agreement and reported in a set of civic metrics without necessarily altering how an institution allocates its attention or its money. Recent work within the sector’s own civic infrastructure has been candid about this, noting how readily engagement can become tokenistic and how exposed civic commitments are when finances tighten. That work has also begun to carefully distinguish between activity that is genuinely co-created with local partners and activity that is essentially performed for an audience. The distinction matters, because the two can look remarkably similar in an annual report whilst differing entirely in what they ask of the institution.
This is not a charge of bad faith. Institutions have adopted civic language for reasons that are mostly sincere and a great deal of civic work is real and valuable. The observation is a more structural one about incentives. When a claim can be made at low cost and carries reputational benefit, there is little to prevent its adoption and correspondingly little external pressure to examine whether the operational reality matches the stated commitment. The claim floats somewhat free of the thing it describes.
The condition that changes the terms
What locally held funding introduces is a condition under which the distance between claim and capacity becomes visible and, occasionally, consequential. A partnership that draws together regional investment, private co-investment and a university’s research or convening capacity can achieve something none of the parties could manage alone. It can only do so, though, where the university brings something a local decision-maker actually values, and where it has the internal machinery to move at the pace such partnerships require. Neither of those can be summoned from a strategy document. They tend to be the product of sustained investment in relationships, in the professional capacity to broker and manage multi-party arrangements and in a governance structure that treats civic work as core rather than as adornment.
A note of caution is warranted here. The more enthusiastic sector commentary tends to present this as an opportunity to be seized, often illustrated with a handful of striking examples of universities anchoring regional renewal. Those examples are worth a careful read, since they are frequently supplied by parties with a commercial interest in institutions pursuing such arrangements, and a small number of visible successes tells us rather little about how often the model works. The more interesting question concerns what distinguishes the institutions that can do this from those that have so far only said they can.
Accountability that points outwards
Beneath the practical question sits a governance one that the civic turn has tended to leave unexamined. An institution that takes its place-based identity seriously is, in effect, accepting a form of accountability to its locality, local partners, and the communities whose priorities shape the funding it hopes to attract. That accountability does not obviously align with the national frame through which universities are chiefly held to account, and the two may occasionally pull in different directions. A project that serves a region well may not register clearly in a national measure, and an activity that performs well against national expectations may do rather little for the place an institution claims to serve.
Governing bodies have not, on the whole, been asked to hold these two forms of accountability together in any deliberate way. Civic mission tends to appear in board papers as a matter of reputation and external relations rather than as a strategic commitment carrying resource and risk implications. If the civic claim is now to be tested by real funding and real partners, the question of how a board oversees an accountability that points outwards, towards place, becomes more pressing than it has generally been treated.
What the test might reveal
None of this suggests that institutions should retreat from civic commitment, nor that locally directed funding is anything other than a genuine opportunity for those positioned to use it well. It suggests, more modestly, that a comfortable identity is about to meet the conditions that would test it, and that the meeting may prove instructive. Some institutions will find that the capacity behind their civic language is real, and that the funding rewards it. Others may find the distance between what they have claimed and what they can deliver to be wider than any annual report has ever disclosed.
The questions that follow are ones worth mulling over. When a civic identity becomes testable, is it still held as readily as when it cost little? What would it ask of a governing body to answer to place with something like the seriousness it brings to the national frame? And if the funding comes to reward built capacity rather than stated intent, which institutions may find they have been describing a commitment they had not yet made?