Chapter 5

The local economic and social impact of universities

Why the local impact matters

Ed’s experience of promoting the merger of Monash University’s Gippsland campus with the University of Ballarat to form a new regional economic powerhouse, Federation University, was that the merger was inspirational. Gippsland was one of Australia’s most disadvantaged regions but the new university has already proved very successful in better meeting regional economic and social needs.

He continues to believe that, though universities do best when they have strong international partnerships, these are greatly strengthened in terms of institutional support when they bring manifest benefit at home. Research can lead to positive community outcomes and supporting jobs. It is possible to increase educational opportunities across university degrees or international study opportunities and it is local impact that is more noted and is most crucial.

His passionate belief is that it is as important as ever for universities to be both local and global and for the global to benefit the local.

Charles had experience as the Member of Parliament for the constituency of Norwich South, which included both the University of East Anglia and the city and civic centre. This showed the immense benefits of a wide variety of types of partnership that could be achieved when they worked together but also the often substantial difficulties in getting practical agreement on joint strategies.

These experiences led us to believe that the local economic and social role of universities really matters.

Introduction

Chapters 3 and 4 of this book address the importance of universities for work and for research, and their importance in facing the big national and international challenges in those areas.

However, in very many ways, the principal impact of universities is local. In Chapter 2, we saw the ways in which many universities, for example in Scotland and the civic universities of England and their successors, were the explicit product of civic economic and social commitment, and that is also the case across the US, Europe and Australia. That history has, ever since, been at the core of their existence.

In this chapter, we discuss the nature of their local impacts, which extend across the economic development of towns and cities to the civic and public engagement, that universities should bring with them.

That is the context within which we address the particular importance of local university action for the last three of those pillars we identified in Chapter 1:

• offer approaches to harness the process of change for general benefit;
• educate and train the specialists whose skills are necessary to address change;
• create an intellectually engaging climate and culture across societies.

Of course, different localities vary immensely, as does the importance of their universities to that community, with the different roles that they have and that we have described.

This is not the place to develop a general theory of the local role of universities but we think that there are a number of common points that can be developed and that will guide both university behaviour and government approaches to stimulating local university interventions.

We begin with the importance that some commentators have recently given to the positive role of the university in contesting the negative effects of globalisation, and then discuss the more general local impact of universities.

We then consider the important local civic and intellectual role of universities promoting an intellectually engaging climate and culture across societies.

Universities and globalisation

The central theme of this book is the need for universities to help the world to deal with the challenges of increasingly rapid global change. They have already played a major role in the scientific, technological and economic breakthroughs that have enabled globalisation to happen. That will continue and intensify.

Of course, this globalisation has happened on a global scale but, as it has, it has left hundreds of individual localities around the world floundering in its wake. It has brought well-recognised local downsides in parallel with global upsides.

As we have seen, the steady expansion of world trade and destruction of tariffs and protections has led large parts of our populations to lose faith in the capacity of the whole post-war system to meet the problems they experience, whether economic, social or cultural in nature.

Whatever the economic successes of ‘globalisation’ in the round, it did not answer the widespread concerns of individuals and communities about economic desolation in some geographical areas, such as the US rust belt and the former coal and steel communities in the UK, France and elsewhere. Nor did it sufficiently address worries about control of the immigration, which was a significant side-effect of globalisation as individuals moved, as they have always done, from economically less successful areas to build a livelihood in more prosperous parts of the world. It’s been true since Dick Whittington went to London in the 14th century to find the streets that he hoped were paved with gold.

However, the speed of current change has no historical precedent. It is disrupting almost every industry in almost every country and the possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity and access to knowledge, are unlimited. And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing.

Among the many implications of this accelerating process of economic and technological change is the transformation of entire systems of production, management and, importantly, governance. In addition, it highlights the critical importance of higher quality education and training and spotlights the further decline of traditional communities.

This highlights the relatively weak position of those who don’t have the education that would have helped them deal with what have become threats to their whole way of life.

Analyses of both the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US Presidential election point to the importance of education in explaining voting behaviour.

An analysis by Adam Jacobs¹ concluded that education was a remarkably strong predictor of voting outcome in the EU referendum, and that that statistical relationship is not much affected by age or ethnicity.

A Brookings Institute study² observed that 75% of voters with a post-secondary degree voted to remain in the EU while 73% of voters without one voted to leave the EU, and demonstrated similar divergences in the US 2016 Presidential Election.

It should have been no surprise that those who believed that they had lost out from that very process of globalisation turned towards those populist political leaders, of both right and left, who spoke out against the status quo rather than just going along with it.

Tens of millions of people moved away from their support for the economic and social model that had served so well for decades and towards the challenges represented by Brexit in the UK, Donald Trump in the US and similar movements in a number of other countries.

There has always been some social division between those with post-school education and those without but the circumstances have now changed so much and the numbers of those with post-school education have increased so greatly that the dangers of divided, even polarised, societies have become a real threat to economic and social stability.

The challenge posed by those opposed to globalisation and the post-war system is existential. But the central point is that the main responsibility for this state of affairs lies less with Trump and the Brexit supporters themselves than with those who did not use their economic and political power well enough to address the concerns that those people had before they fell for the snake-oil offers put forward by the new ‘nativist populists’ as they have been called. Brexit and Trump only exploited a failure by the governing ‘establishment’, which had failed to reinvigorate the very institutions and system that had the responsibility for dealing with these issues.

And universities are at the core of that challenge. So the question arises, can universities do more to deal with the perceived downsides of globalisation rather than just, in effect, creating the conditions for, and to some extent benefiting from, the upside?

The answer turns out to be a qualified yes.

Two recent books have emphasised the important roles that universities can play in helping local communities recover from the economic devastation that globalisation has forced upon them.

The first, The Smartest Places on Earth: Why Rustbelts are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation,³ by Antoine van Agtmael and Fred Bakker, shows how ‘rustbelt’ cities such as Akron, Ohio and Albany, New York (eg the SUNY Poly NanoTech complex⁴) in the US and Eindhoven in Holland are becoming the centres of global innovation, and creating new sources of economic strength though coming from ‘rustbelt’ areas that had been written off.

They identify a series of cities – Dresden in Germany, Lund-Malmö in Sweden, Oulu in Finland, Batesville in Mississippi, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Portland, Oregon and Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina, and also others in the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, France and Israel – where a combination of forces – local universities, visionary thinkers, regional government initiatives, start-ups and big corporations – have created what they call ‘brainbelts’ that are transforming and creating industries that have turned the tide from cheap, outsourced production.

Their list does not only include purely ‘rustbelt’ areas, but also includes some well-known university-industry centres. However, a lot of them are globalisation losers. There are other examples at places like Wollongong, Australia’s tenth largest city and a traditional centre of heavy industry with an ambitious university.

Other than the crucial role of the university itself, these authors emphasise the entrepreneurial importance of the ‘Connector’. This is usually an individual who has sufficient vision, energy, networking capacity and drive to assemble the working partnerships and engagement that bring together university, industry, government and others to make change happen. They emphasise that the ‘Connector’ can come from any one of a range of places but must have the ability to make the connections that are essential.

They also emphasise ‘the pragmatism ambition and the collaborativeness of local and regional politicians, entrepreneurs and scientists’ who were ready to come together, and the importance of a wide variety of types of initiative that promote interdisciplinary collaboration.

They are clear that today’s innovation is more bottom-up than top-down and that support, for example in the form of incentives and rewards, can help, including guidelines and articulation of best practice.

For the purpose of this book, however, what is important is the critical significance of the university itself in this process of regenerating a local economy, sometimes devastated by the collapse of traditional industries, and the related importance of high quality university leadership that can stimulate and engage with such a process, a point to which we return in Chapter 9.

A supplement to this view comes from John C Austen writing from the Brookings Institute,^5,6 who notes how important the university system has become to the economy of the Great Lakes rustbelt region. Universities in this region date back to the beginning of the 19th century and ‘are, in many ways, the foundation of the Midwest’s society, economy, and identity. No meeting of state business, civic, or political leaders in Michigan is held without the requisite nod to these university allegiances.’ This area of the Midwest boasts no fewer than 20 of the world’s top 200 greatest research institutions, including institutions such as the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. With 31% of the nation’s population, Rustbelt states produce 35% of the nation’s total bachelor’s degree holders, 33% of its STEM graduates and 32% of higher education degrees awarded.

Austen goes as far as to say that the university efforts are resulting in a rebooting of local economies for a post-rustbelt era. Austen makes the point that, as well as providing superb education for locals and inculcating an entrepreneurial mindset, these institutions are massive employers of labour and serve as anchors for new business development. He notes the economic development of areas such as Green Bay, Wisconsin and Kalamazoo, Michigan.

And a further reinforcement of the importance of universities in post-globalisation local regeneration comes from Our Towns,⁷ James and Deborah Fallows’ more quirky account of five years of journeys across the US to look at a wide range of communities hit by globalisation.

These are their conclusions about what made towns succeed in finding a prosperous post-globalisation future:

1. People working together on practical local possibilities.
2. Picking out the ‘local patriots’.
3. Making the phrase ‘public-private partnerships’ something real.
4. A well-understood civic story.
5. Having downtowns.
6. Being near a research university.
7. Having and caring about a community college.
8. Having distinctive innovative schools.
9. Making themselves outward-looking and open.
10. Having big plans.

Again, the significance of the university, the partnerships and networks, the history narrative and the innovatory approaches stand out.

And, in fact, the importance of universities to the regions desolated by the decline of traditional industries such as coal, steel, shipbuilding, cars and tyres should be clear.

These areas cannot be regenerated by economic protection and trade barriers to try to bring back the old industries. Even if that approach might ever have worked, and we doubt it, the stable door was open and the horse has well and truly bolted.

Nor can these areas be regenerated by state actions, or a series of welfare protections, important though they may well be in the short term. They all need to find again the competitive advantage that coal, steel, mass industrial production or transport gave them in the past and that brought them the prosperity that lasted for perhaps 150 years before it declined.

That is the meaning of the process of economic change we have discussed earlier in this book. The old industries will not provide a sustainable economic and social future for the communities we are considering. That will only come from the industries and economics of the future, whatever they may be. It is universities, working locally, that give the best possibility of helping that change to take place, and building the new community.

The most likely source of resilient competitive advantage in the future comes from the creativity and innovation in new industries that universities are best placed to offer, properly stimulating and properly stimulated. And, in addition, the universities, possibly with associated schools and colleges, such as further education colleges, are best placed to provide the education and training those communities need to provide the new workforce that will be required.

That is why we believe that universities should adopt a strong local approach and play a very important role in counteracting the impact of globalisation in those localities that have suffered most from it.

This seems to us an absolutely central question for universities seeking to address the challenges of change.

We would encourage more systematic analysis of what could be achieved and believe that further work in this field is worth doing.

And, of course, there are already excellent local examples of work in this field (outside the immediate context of globalisation) that demonstrate the impact that universities can and do have upon the economies of their communities and it is to this that we now turn.

General economic impact of universities

The most obvious example of the economic impact of world-class research comes from the US.

At the end of the Second World War, on the advice of Vannevar Bush, President Truman decided not only to increase massively government investment in research but to make it almost exclusively through the university system because of the manifest excellence that was there.

This accelerated the development of about 50 universities in the US that have contributed enormously to the economy. There are many examples, such as Boston, North Carolina, the incredible medical research development with massive industry spin-offs in San Diego, Silicon Valley in the bay area of San Francisco with contributions from Caltech and Berkeley. Most of the world’s modern great companies, including Hewlett Packard and many more, were directly spawned from these university centres. They drove the information revolution, the ‘third industrial revolution’.

A key figure was Fred Terman, the Provost of Stanford University, who, in the mid-20th century, conceived the value of close-proximity industrial engagement and the importance of the university helping spin-offs and graduate start-ups.

He had a vision, revolutionary at the time, but widely accepted today, of the value of a knowledge cluster on the doorstep of his institution, and he pursued it with vigour. The result today is Silicon Valley, which has had a tremendous impact on the world.

This big story is supplemented by a large number of smaller stories. Almost all universities have a significant impact in the communities around them. This happens in many ways and it is always amazing to see the incredible impact that a university can have in supporting and improving local economies in so many different ways. Scope and responsibility vary considerably from institution to institution. A great research university in a small town is likely to be the key supporter of the local economy yet the main mission of the university is likely to be international scholarship at the highest level. A great research university in a megacity may also play a significant role in the local economy but it is likely to target a range of industries and services globally too. In this chapter, we concentrate on the university that is central to the success of a city or region.

The best way to illustrate this is by looking at a series of examples.

Let’s start with the UK where the University of Newcastle upon Tyne is a high quality research university. While established just over 50 years ago after previous affiliation with Durham University, its origins are much older in an engineering college, Armstrong College, and a medical college, King’s College, both established about 150 years ago. Since that time, it has gone from strength to strength and is now one of the strongest institutions in the UK. It sits alongside a high quality, more technically and educationally focused institution, the University of Northumbria and, together, these institutions provide a home for tens of thousands of students in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Only a few decades ago, the economy of the North East of England was dominated by heavy industry including steel, shipbuilding on a grand scale and coal mining. All of these heavy industries, including the coal mines, fell into a precipitous decline with the result that heavy industry jobs largely disappeared from an area that had been dependent on them. The universities sought to step into the breach and Newcastle today is a transformed post-industrial city dominated in large part by its leading universities which offer great education for both national and international students. The universities together provide a wide range of courses in almost every conceivable area for local students and it is noteworthy that a high proportion of local students go to university in their own backyard. The universities also draw international students into the city, generating considerable wealth. They employ a large number of staff and draw other activities into the city, which essentially underpins the economic wealth of the area. Indeed, without the university presence, the city would be greatly diminished.

This is only one example and this model has been replicated in a range of other great post-industrial cities such as Liverpool and Glasgow. Of course, budding industry, including high-tech industry, tends to grow alongside universities in part because of spin-offs and in part because of intellectual synergies and a number of these cities show evidence of increasing activities of that type.

Around the world there has been a tendency for smaller cities and towns, previously lacking a university, to try to develop, attract or grow one because of this wide recognition of the accelerated effect on economic development. This has often been done in the past through branch campuses. These may continue to thrive as branch campuses (of which there are some examples in Canada) or may transform into full-scale universities in their own right. In the UK, one of the most successful examples of the latter is the University of Lincoln, which has continued to expand in recent times. While the city is ancient and has had an educational presence for many centuries, the University is relatively new. The University of Humberside was approached to develop a new campus to the south-west of Lincoln leading to a new entity, the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside, launched in 1996. The first few hundred students rapidly expanded to many thousands and eventually the University changed its name to the University of Lincoln in 2001. This was accompanied by a massive new development involving more than £150 million, transforming the city of Lincoln from an old city centre brownfield site to a vibrant retail leisure and property development centred around the University. The University is credited with creating at least 3,000 jobs within Lincoln and generates almost £0.25 billion a year for the local economy. These achievements led its VC, Mary Stewart, to be recognised as the Guardian Vice-Chancellor of the year in 2018.

Following the 2003/4 legislation in the UK, universities were established in places such as Bournemouth, Derby, Gloucester, Ipswich, Northampton and Worcester, which previously had had no universities at all, and this has led to similar stories, some of quite outstanding success.

Looking to Australia, the impact of the university sector on the country broadly is immeasurable. The sector provides high quality education for local graduates as well as a massive international student market and it underpins much of the smart industry in the country . Perhaps in contradistinction to the UK, even some of the largest Australian cities depend on higher education to sustain their economy. Victoria in Australia’s South is dominated by the city of Melbourne, a metropolis of over 5 million people. According to the Victorian State government, which has analysed the economic value of Victoria’s international education effort from year to year, the educational service sector in Victoria (and this is predominantly tertiary education) generated $9.1 billion in export revenue in 2016–17, representing the state’s best performance to date and growth of well over $1 billion from the previous year. This supported almost 60,000 jobs and was the most important export for the great city of Melbourne. This was supported by a range of institutions with 7 out of 10 universities figuring in significant rankings of the world’s best. It is noteworthy that this international student market is embraced by the local population as well as both major political parties and figures in Australia’s economic planning for the future in a major way.

Regional Australia includes a number of smaller towns and cities, typically long distances away from metropolitan centres. University education is crucial for many of these as a factor in the local economy. The role of satellite campuses of leading public universities in smaller centres is also significant.

Bendigo, one of Victoria’s largest regional cities, has long since developed a branch campus from Latrobe University, a Melbourne metropolitan institution. This campus has grown to acquire most disciplines and is now a very significant entity in its own right. The poorest area of the state of Victoria is the regional area of Gippsland. This contains a string of smaller towns and developed a Technology Institute years ago which was taken over by Monash University as a regional campus. This branch campus grew to a significant size and Ed promoted the merger of Monash University, Gippsland campus, with the University of Ballarat to form a new regionally based powerhouse, Federation University, which plays a huge role in sustaining the economy in regional Victoria. This role includes educating young people for a range of jobs relevant to working in the country, close partnerships with businesses and government and the employment of large numbers of staff who are regionally based. There was much local resistance to this in Gippsland, one of Australia’s most disadvantaged regions, but it has proved very successful in better meeting regional needs. Almost all regional universities in Australia underpin the local economy.

This phenomenon of revitalisation of an economy through university activity, whether gradual and incremental as in the case of the great northern cities of the UK or accelerated and planned as, for example, with the University of Lincoln, is becoming ever more prevalent around the world. While crucial at local level, the university system in any advanced nation is becoming increasingly relevant to its economy. In the age of AI, the pivot of human activity and thought towards high-level jobs and intellectual activity is irreversible. Universities are central to this story. Society has been transformed more rapidly than ever before and knowledge is doubling every few years. Out of this knowledge comes new technology, business and industry transformation and indeed a new world. The university system, that part of society that specialises in knowledge, is at the heart of this process, reinforced by wide and complex linkages across government and industry. While recognised at an intellectual level by government in most countries, national university policy does not always reflect the need to nurture and develop the country’s university sector at this pivotal time.

We’ve concentrated to date in this chapter on some of many thousands of examples of regional impact. However, it’s also worth mentioning the impact great universities have in megacities. Nowadays, even the most elite research university in a great city generally has an important role locally as well as globally. This always involves the employment of many thousands of people, with local economic benefit. It almost always involves supporting local industry through partnerships and through high-tech start-ups and spin-offs. Generally, there will be collaborations with major industry also, such as the pharmaceutical industry. This leads to the concept of the high-tech precinct as a collaboration between great universities, industry and government.

There are many of these around the world and, of course, the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley always stand out. Other great examples in North America include the city of San Diego – a critical mass of medical research and pharmaceutical industry activity, developed in just a few decades underpinned by the presence of the Scripps Institute, the Salt Institute, the Burnham Institute and the University of California San Diego. This is undoubtedly now one of the major medical research localities on Earth and, together with strengths in Los Angeles and in the Bay Area, contributes to the massive overall strength of the Californian knowledge production system and of the Californian economy. The North Carolina Triangle and the Rhine Necker Triangle in Germany are other examples, as is the thriving industry park around Cambridge University in the UK. Interestingly, the major new development areas of China tend to be based on a similar model. Ed had the opportunity to help establish an international postgraduate university in the Chinese city of Suzhou in the industry precinct, which had been created by the government of Singapore and the national government of China. A thriving city of several million people has been developed in just over a decade with several great universities, both Chinese and branch campuses of international universities, and thriving smart industry. This surely is an example of the city of the future and China is developing many more!

Well, what about the old world? The world’s megacities tend to be rather comfortable with their universities which have often been there for many centuries. Yet still these institutions have the opportunity to develop impact, complementing and enhancing their education and research as a key part of their mission. King’s College London’s new strategic plan for the next 10 years gives global, national and local impact equal significance to absolute excellence in education and in research. A new Vice-President has been appointed to lead this initiative, which ranges from environmental awareness to equity and diversity programmes to direct interaction with local government and industry.

THE recently published its first ranking of impact across a range of measured parameters for the world’s universities and King’s ranked 5th in the world on these parameters, some way above its already high ranking in the main table. Worcester also does exceptionally well. Both New York University and Cornell are involved in major new projects in New York City, in the case of Cornell a massive research development with the Technion in Israel following an initiative by Mayor Bloomberg.

Perhaps the most striking example of inner city rejuvenation by an American university was initiated some years ago by the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania. Under President Amy Guttman’s leadership, Penn launched a massive new development in downtown Philadelphia called Penn Connects,⁸ based on 24 acres of land purchased from the US postal service. The ambitions of this project were enormous in boosting not only educational and economic, but also social, capital in the city of Philadelphia which had become rather rundown in its central precincts. This project has expanded with increased ambition to nurture start-ups and is now a central part of the Philadelphia economy. This has proved attractive to major industry as well as start-ups, a particular win being the creation of Johnson & Johnson’s new research laboratories.

So, the story of university local economic impact is already strong and productive. We turn now to what the government and others could do to help.

Government and local university development

Most of the economic impact of universities described above has come as a result of the efforts of the universities themselves, and the partnerships that they have built. Among these is a vital partnership with all levels of government from the very local to the international (eg the EU).

Governments at all levels – international, national, regional and local – recognise the importance of local economic development, acknowledge that universities have a significant contribution to make and offer strategies and resources to encourage that contribution.

But at least as important as the actual resources offered by government, which are usually fairly small-scale, relatively speaking, is its contribution to the university’s strategic thinking and wider collaborations as the university develops this kind of approach. It is these collaborations that can generate really significant resources for new investment, for example in new infrastructure which may be decisive in making change happen.

Most governments now have some form of funding support, usually pump-priming rather than substantive, to assist and incentivise universities to extend and develop their local economic role. The current UK examples are the Higher Education Innovation Fund,⁹ which provides funding for knowledge exchange to support and develop a broad range of interactions between universities and the wider world; a Connecting Capability Fund,¹⁰ which supports university collaboration in research commercialisation and aims to encourage university external technological, industrial and regional partnerships; and University Enterprise Zones (UEZs),¹¹ which are intended to generate and commercialise innovation and deliver skills that best serve the key sectors in their local and regional economy. In 2015, four pilot UEZs were established in Nottingham, Liverpool, Bradford and Bristol.

Such programmes can help universities in this area but there is a question about the extent to which such regeneration strategies do in fact engage universities at more than a formal level. National government can support, but not usually successfully initiate, engagement, although local or regional government, for example through a mayor, may be able to play an initiating role.

In the UK, there is also a significant issue about the overall geographical distribution of research funding, which is also a major contributor to local economic growth. For example, in 2015–16,¹² the proportion of the then £3.1 billion spending of Research Councils UK in each country or region of the UK was as follows:

Thus, the London, East and South East regions received about 57% of national research spending whereas the North East, North West, Yorkshire & Humberside and Midlands, with about the same total population, received about 24%. This is, of course, a massive reinforcement of the acute regional economic divisions in England and contributes to the sense of social division to which we referred earlier in this chapter resulting from the impact of globalisation’s winners and losers.

Perhaps it is also worth mentioning here that the proportion of that research money that goes towards the programmes to incentivise universities’ local economic development is absolutely tiny and so will not feature highly when a university comes to think strategically about the sources of its government funds.

Governments need to recognise the need to plan appropriately to be able to spread research funding more equitably in a geographical sense. We acknowledge that this is not straightforward, both because of the academic independence from government of the new funding body, UK Research and Innovation, and because of the need to support research at the world-class level which is already geographically distributed in a heavily weighted way towards London and the South East. We would recommend identifying a small number of already research-intensive universities across the country where resource will be focused. This has already happened to some extent in Manchester, for example with the development of the highly innovatory material graphene, but it could also be done in other universities, perhaps having in mind the kind of potential local economic development that we have described earlier in this chapter.

University in civic community

Most of this chapter has focused upon the local economic impact of universities but we now turn to the important local civic and intellectual role of universities promoting an intellectually engaging climate and culture across societies.

A central reason why we have set this university role as one of the four pillars that we have identified as important university contributions at a time of very rapid change is the growth of disdain for facts and realities and their replacement by ‘fake news’ in the public discourse. This is itself one product of the increasingly divided, even polarised, post-globalisation society that we discussed earlier in this chapter. This ‘anti-science’ culture is, of course, inimical to the whole university ethic as it has developed over centuries and it is very dangerous for societies as it challenges a central premise of the ways in which we should be addressing change, that is through understanding correctly what is happening and then trying to deal with it in the best way possible.

There are important national ways in which universities can promote such a rational approach. But the local role is perhaps even more significant and important. It can be done in a number of ways, for example:

• engaging with local schools and colleges;
• looking to the future with local private and public sector employers;
• examining the way that local societies are developing, including engaging civic leaders;
• promoting equality and opportunity for the least advantaged people in the local society;
• considering ways of building social cohesion and eroding social divisions;
• developing strong civic and historical public narratives of the locality;
• looking at the ways in which grand challenges, such as environmental sustainability, public health and technological change, apply to the locality;
• promoting debate about, and looking at ways in which, cities and communities can be made more sustainable in general;
• engaging with local government upon their strategic priorities for the locality, for example in relation to education, health, crime and transport, including examining innovative means of delivering high quality public services;
• encouraging students to be active in local communities;
• promoting discussion and debate in local communities.

These are only examples and there is no national template that can simply be applied locally. The most valuable activity can only be determined by local universities engaging directly with the priorities and concerns of their local community, whatever they may be.

One UK organisation that promotes this kind of activity is the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement.¹³ Based at the University of Western England and the University of Bristol, and funded by UKRI and Wellcome, it seeks to support a culture change in the UK higher education sector so that the sector makes a vital, strategic and valued contribution to 21st-century society through its public engagement activity. It supports excellent public engagement practice, creating the conditions for public engagement to thrive in universities and build strong networks and partnerships to amplify their impact.

As one Vice-Chancellor put it, universities have a choice between being ‘engines of equality’, through strong local community engagement and promoting the public benefit and common good, or ‘engines of inequality’,¹⁴ keeping the poorer people out and standing aloof from their community. The choice should be obvious and we believe that the course of public engagement is the path for the future role of universities.

One final point for local university discussion is the most appropriate future pattern of university organisation in a city. For example, there are five higher education institutions in Leeds: University of Leeds, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds Trinity University, Leeds Arts University and Leeds College of Music. They all have their own distinctive, distinguished histories, going back a century or more. And they all have their own missions and individual strengths and weaknesses, serving a local as well as national community.

This pattern of university provision in Leeds may or may not well reflect the needs of the future, either in research or teaching. And the same could be said of other cities both in the UK and the rest of the world.

Local co-operation and integrated planning at regional level are more advanced in Australia probably in part due to the state system. In Victoria, for example, the eight universities meet regularly in a formal committee at Vice-Chancellor level and plan collectively on issues relevant to the state – that is to say local issues.

A discussion worth having in a given locality is what is the best form of organisation of universities in that locality to meet local needs. This is a discussion that it is far better to have locally than resulting from some national ‘rationalisation’.

So we would suggest that universities in particular cities should give active consideration to the most rational pattern of university research and teaching in that locality and consider what steps should be taken to enable that to happen. And government should consider what incentives it can offer to encourage a more rational pattern of universities across the country.

Conclusion

We have given attention to the relationship of universities to their locality for two reasons. The first is the critical need for society to address the adverse consequences of globalisation, where we think that universities have a very important, positive role to play. The second is that, in contrast to the obvious impact of the great university drivers of research and teaching, it is often difficult to get a real focus on universities’ immediately local impact. And indeed, very many academic staff, students and sometimes university leaders do not give this any form of priority in their thinking.

And that is why: