Civic engagement is fast becoming one of higher education’s most visible strategic priorities. Across the sector, universities are refreshing mission statements, announcing new community partnerships and broadening their impact narratives in ways that mirror earlier enthusiasm towards decolonisation and equity, diversity and inclusion. The civic university is increasingly positioned as a shorthand for public value, relevance and social responsibility in a challenging political and funding environment.
In the UK, this shift has been strongly shaped by Universities UK (UUK), which has deliberately framed the civic university in practical, operational terms. Rather than treating civic engagement as an optional add-on, it defines the civic university as one that “uses its assets, people, research, purchasing power, estates and convening authority to support local prosperity, skills development, public services and community well-being”.
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This framing matters because it broadens the civic role of universities well beyond teaching and research, it is not just about what universities do, but how they exercise their institutional power locally. As this operational understanding gains momentum, particularly through tools such as civic university agreements, the civic university increasingly resembles higher education’s next policy moment.
The challenge now is less about adopting the language of civic engagement and more about translating it into sustained practice, aligning internal incentives, redistributing resources and building long-term, reciprocal relationships with local partners.
But civic engagement is often translated into initiatives that are highly visible but structurally shallow. Short-term projects, pilot programmes and carefully curated partnerships can demonstrate activity, but they rarely challenge existing power relations between universities and communities.
In practice, civic engagement risks becoming something that is performed for audits, funding calls or reputational signalling, rather than embedded in teaching, research and governance. This matters because genuine civic engagement cannot simply be layered onto existing institutional models without reworking them.
So, the key question is how do universities become impactful civic institutions?
1. Relinquish control and allow communities to take action
Long-term, reciprocal relationships require universities to relinquish some control over research agendas, curricular design and definitions of expertise. Communities must be able to shape questions, not merely respond to them. Students must be positioned as learners with communities, rather than temporary problem-solvers passing through them.
For example, creating community advisory panels or listening exercises that generate polished reports but carry no binding authority. Community representatives are invited to contribute insight, yet remain structurally unable to influence curricula, research priorities or resource allocation. They document their engagement, while institutional practices remain largely unchanged. Instead, universities must allow communities to take action that better serves them.
The University of Westminster demonstrated this through the development of Zone29, its new hub for careers and enterprise, which opened in the spring. Designed to support and collaborate with community groups, Zone29 has been shaped by a wide range of voices. It has worked closely with local businesses and residents to create an inclusive physical and digital space.
Through partnerships with local organisations and employers, the hub will engage in inclusive, community-embedded programmes that equip marginalised individuals and groups with the practical, future-focused skills London’s labour market demands, spanning digital capability, enterprise and green economy competencies, while creating reciprocal value by connecting employers with diverse local talent pipelines, strengthening community resilience and enabling partners to co-design solutions that respond directly to real workforce needs.
2. Treat civic engagement as core academic work
At its weakest, civic engagement is absorbed into familiar managerial logics. Universities launch highly visible initiatives led by small numbers of already overextended staff, often without formal workload allocation or sustained resourcing. They frame engagement as passion-driven service rather than recognised academic labour, relying on the emotional commitment of individuals rather than institutional infrastructure. As with earlier waves of EDI and decolonisation work, responsibility is quietly devolved downwards while strategic credit flows upwards.
In these cases, staff are expected to build trust, manage complex relationships and navigate community expectations on top of full teaching and research loads. When initiatives stall, as they often do without time, continuity or trust, it’s framed as a lack of engagement, rather than a lack of structural support. Civic work becomes appropriative and onerous not only for communities, but for the staff and students tasked with delivering it.
More credible approaches look very different. Civic engagement needs to be treated as core academic work rather than voluntary service. Universities allocate formal workload time for relationship-building, recognise emotional and relational labour within promotion criteria, and invest in continuity beyond individual grants or champions. These partnerships are slower, less marketable and harder to quantify but they are far more durable.
3. Embed civic engagement into curricula
At the University of Westminster, some civic engagement is evident not through one-off initiatives but through sustained, curriculum-embedded partnerships. Multi-year knowledge exchange projects have seen students and staff work with local charities and community organisations to support disadvantaged communities through co-designed training in AI literacy, financial literacy and employability skills, including a transnational programme extending beyond the UK.
It has also embedded civic action into teaching through credit-bearing modules on community organising, where students collaborate with civic partners, such as Citizens UK, to campaign on issues like fair pay and the living wage structures. They seek to sustain meaningful, reciprocal civic practice that generate meaningful benefits for both communities and the university.
What distinguishes these examples is not good intentions, but infrastructure commitment. Civic engagement succeeds when institutions recognise that building trust, reciprocity and nurturing relationships take time, which must be paid for, protected and valued. Without this, the civic university risks replicating the same patterns seen in earlier values-led agendas, high moral ambition, low institutional follow-through.
At a moment when universities face intense pressure to justify their social licence, the temptation to prioritise visible, auditable civic activity is understandable. But the credibility of the civic university will depend on whether institutions are willing to absorb the costs of genuine engagement, whether that’s time, emotional or organisational.
To sustain civic engagement beyond shifting policy agendas, let’s move beyond symbolic partnership-making and confront harder questions of responsibility (who bears the work), representation (who holds voice and influence) and reciprocity (who benefits and how). The real test lies not in how frequently civic language appears in strategy documents, but in whether communities materially shape institutional practices.
Sobia Razzaq is senior lecturer in law at the University of Westminster.
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