A civic agenda about groups, communities, populations and people

Rachel Wolf, founding partner at Public First, made the point in the opening of The Festival of Higher Education that engaging with places is about “groups, communities, populations and people.”

Wolf’s point is a salient one.

As someone who writes a lot about universities, research, and the wider civic agenda, I know I’m often guilty of writing about civicness as primarily an issue of structures. I’ve often thought about civicness as being about who gets to make decisions under which conditions and for whose benefits.

Lots of good, obvious things

This is partly because I don’t work directly with people whose lives universities seek to affect. It is also because the excellent civic work in universities is formally expressed through structures, funders, partners and people with legal or positional authority to act.

But, as Wolf pointed out, civic impact is about teaching and it’s also about the culmination of activities that make universities more civically engaged.

In the same session Katy Shaw, professor of 21st century writing and publishing at Northumbria University, made the point that for many people universities are these “other spaces.” These are the buildings that a sliver of the public knows about and a set of activities that an even smaller proportion of the public could tell you about.

This idea of an other space matters because while a lot of people benefit from the great jobs, investment, and opportunities a university brings, most people do not experience the civic impacts of a university directly.

And a more direct experience of civicness is good in its own terms and an issue which university leaders are thinking about.

To take another example from The Festival of Higher Education, Wendy Thomson, vice chancellor of the University of London, set out how her university has made its infrastructure more accessible. They have opened buildings to make a warm space with wifi and facilities available to their students and their wider community.

Caring

The very local but nonetheless bureaucratically difficult things show a place that their university cares about them.

The way many people experience universities is not through strategic activity but through the seemingly mundane. It is somewhere to have a coffee before 9am, access to sports fields and swimming lessons, and a sense that the university is not some “other space”.

This other space is both about physical infrastructure but it is also about whether universities feel part of their places, not a nice addition to it. It is through continually working to be part of their places that universities maintain legitimacy to act on behalf of it.

This legitimacy is important because universities seek to do wide-ranging things that impact people’s lives. Universities shape economic strategies, power the cultural life of their places and contribute to enormous country-shifting projects like R&D and industrial strategies. Universities’ ability to do this work is founded in an implicit contract that they are legitimate representatives of the interests of their places made real through their research, teaching and civic activity.

It is only from this that universities can then legitimately engage in the enormous challenge that they, often rightly, believe they can solve. As Andy Westwood, professor of government practice at the University of Manchester made the case “the role of universities in stagnating or declining economies is a sharp challenge for all of us.”

The future

Westwood’s point raises the question of both the extent to which universities have the responsibility to address these challenges and their capabilities of doing so. This is where a cultural approach to understanding a population, engaging with them, and generally being seen to be on their side is a central part of addressing economic challenges.

From these civic engagements comes the capacity, legitimacy and empathy to reshape places through universities as civic actors.

Undoubtedly, given devolution is one of the few areas of political consensus, a culture of ongoing civic engagement is a challenge today and a means of laying the groundwork for future government intervention.