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A defining feature of a university has always been the ‘universal’ nature of the knowledge that it creates and transmits. Today, within so-called global knowledge societies, some of the claims to universalism arguably become even stronger, in the context of growth in both international labour and student mobility, and as a consequence of new forms of communication technologies reflected, for example, in the emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOCs). The assumptions are that knowledge acquired in one place (or even no place) will ‘work’ in a different place, and indeed everywhere. Yet at the same time, the work of a university must always occur within a context that is necessarily a function of time and place: the current policy framework to which it is subject, the economic situation, the history of the particular institution, and the features of its location or place. And the impact of the university’s work (or at least some of it) will be affected by its location (and vice versa). This book is about universities and places, the opportunities and constraints that place provides and how the placing of universities affects and is affected by other forms of differentiation reflecting institutional hierarchies and functions. It is about the ways in which universities and places shape each other.

The prospects of regional partnerships may have been successfully boosted by public policies and economic circumstances of the past two decades, but the notion of public and community ‘engagement’, often understood at local level, has always been a distinctive mission associated with universities. In recent years, discourses of engagement have also tended to emphasise historical and geographical circumstances of universities as key drivers of expression of their civic engagement (Goddard 2009). It is with this attention to contexts in mind that this chapter seeks to highlight and analyse the patterns of public and community engagement observed in the case studies of our research project.

In the previous chapter, we set out the wider international or global context within which policy developments in the UK have to be understood. This book focuses on the UK case, not as a more or less universal model, but as a case from which it may be possible to draw wider lessons within an increasingly globalised higher education system. In this chapter, we turn to some of the key policy drivers that help to define UK higher education, as well as reflecting on the longer histories of the university system, before turning to outlining the cases on which our research is based. Of course, the dynamics of engagement between universities and their immediate environments do not depend exclusively on the policy paradigms driving regulations and funding of higher education or the devolution of governance. Demands from local labour markets and the generalisation of access to tertiary levels of education have led to changes in the patterns of student participation, and we will consider some of those issues too.

The chapter draws on findings from the project’s four case studies to critically assess the contribution of universities to their regional economic development through three lenses. The first of these relates to the particular economic and development initiatives that universities are involved in and which are explicitly targeted at economic growth or urban regeneration. The second relates to assumptions about the particular status of universities as knowledge hubs. The third considers universities as significant business actors in their own right, whose decisions often have powerful impacts locally. The chapter suggests that the unintended consequences of university activity on places and their regeneration may be as important as the intended ones.

The relationships being explored in this book can only be understood in the context of wider economic and policy shifts at global and European levels, which have dramatically altered the ways in which universities are understood and managed. It seems a long ago, distant mythical age when universities were somehow expected to dedicate themselves to producing members of governing and business elites, while at the same time undertaking disinterested research and scholarship—the further away from the day-to-day experiences of ordinary people the better. In this chapter we focus on three specific issues that have framed recent developments in higher education: the first relates to a growing emphasis on higher education as a 'private', rather than a 'public' good; the second to the repositioning of universitioes within a knowledge economy - and, in particular, their role in regional social-economies; and the third to the potential of universities as agents of social transformation - re-eductaiiong populations for a changing world.

In this chapter, we consider whether a local higher education presence contributes to redressing social inequalities or whether it perpetuates or even reinforces existing patterns of social disadvantage within its region. We explore how the case study universities identified and addressed social disadvantage in their regional contexts. Areas covered include access and widening participation, the provision of skills to individuals and to the local economy, and knowledge exchange activities aiming to tackle disadvantage.

There are significant differences in the local and regional roles of universities in the UK. These reflect differences between the individual universities themselves and in the characteristics of their regional contexts. They reflect both differences in intentions and differences in circumstances. But there are also some similarities in the regional roles, and these arguably reflect more global trends. Universities are ‘global’ institutions in many ways, but they are all located in ‘places’ and the place impacts on the university and the university impacts on the place. The final chapter attempts to locate the universities and the places examined in this book within the wider contexts of the changing roles of universities within emerging knowledge societies and economies.

This chapter further develops aspects of the discussion introduced in Chap. 4 by shifting the focus from economic development and regeneration to related but distinct questions about image and culture. At its simplest, this is reflected in the relationship between universities and the ‘image’ of the places within which they are located. The greater the cultural attractiveness of a region, the greater the opportunities are for attracting students, businesses and influencing wider perceptions both nationally and internationally. Image is a common discourse running through our case studies, particularly in the context of university branding as each seeks to sell itself to students, but also to position itself in a range of national and global hierarchies and league tables.

There are many activities of universities which are intended to ‘make a difference’ to the communities that surround them. Some focus on the economic well-being of a region as a whole. Some are directed at particular areas or groups within a region, reflecting perceived special needs or relative disadvantage. Some university activities will be a result of special initiatives whereas others will reflect the ‘core business’ of teaching and research. For the former, there are questions of sustainability once the initiative has ended, and for the latter, it can be difficult to disentangle local agendas and impacts from other larger goals of knowledge production and transmission.

Within and across many expanded and diversified higher education systems, the recognition and understanding of differences between institutions becomes especially challenging. Forms of both ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ differentiation frequently exist alongside each other, though with increasing attention given to the former. Institutional boundaries become more porous within intra-sector and cross-sector collaborations, as networks become increasingly important in both. Do the ways in which different kinds of higher education institutions interact within networks, as well as the nature of those networks, differ? To what extent do network configurations become platforms for distinct knowledge trajectories to develop? It is possible to detect trends of both convergence and differentiation in these developments within and across higher education systems, reflecting global, national, regional and local influences? In order to capture these trends empirically, the CINHEKS research team developed and applied a form of comparative grid analysis with which to construct profiles of 28 higher education institutions drawn from five countries: Finland, Germany, Portugal, the UK and the USA. Based largely on public information from institutional websites, profile grids were constructed to capture institutional characteristics in terms of context/mission, knowledge organisation, knowledge production, knowledge transmission and knowledge transfer. Within each grid, institutions were compared in respect of dimensions such as local/global, teaching/research, disciplinary/inter-disciplinary, considerable or little networking, inter-sectoral/cross-sectoral orientation, intellectual/entrepreneurial rationales, collaborative/individual approaches etc. The profiles revealed most institutions to be explicitly active in partnerships and networks. Most were active in both intra-sector and cross-sector partnerships. Patterns of difference and convergence emerged though, with the five national systems differentially located across the grids. Two key dimensions reflecting the differences were those of ‘domain’ – intra-sector or cross sector networking – and ‘mission’ – knowledge as a ‘private’ or a ‘public’ good.

This chapter ‘connects the dots’ between the outcomes of the CINHEKS study and relates these to contemporary higher education research practice and policy. This conclusion summarizes our main theoretical and conceptual findings, central empirical results and methodological advances in a way that illuminates the key issues and questions brought into view by the CINHEKS study, as a whole. Our findings are critically contextualized in terms of general challenges in higher education studies, which borrow far more than we generate, especially in terms of theory, conceptual problematization, methodology and methods. Theoretically, the analytical synthesis of network knowledge society is highlighted, as is our coining of the term universtasis, a conceptual problematization resulting from the cross-case analysis of fieldwork carried out by all CINHEKS project teams. The competitive horizons heuristic is spotlighted, as CINHEKS was the first time it was used in an international comparative higher education study. The chapter secondly focuses on the most important empirical findings of the CINHEKS study, focusing on findings regarding the role of place, higher education traditions, academic fields and the way in which comparative framing reveals the way these obscure – in distinct ways – the tensions between policy discourse, actual scholarly practice and societal outcomes. The cross-case analysis of the CINHEKS mixed-methods sequential studies; moving through descriptive, interpretive and explanatory levels of analysis reveals the limitations associated with much of the normative framing used every day by researchers and policy makers alike. In addition, interdisciplinary inquiry focused on comparative policy analysis, novel historical framing, shifting competitive horizons and the use of social network analysis sheds new light on both established and emergent forms of stratification within academe – and societies – in a manner that defies much of the oversimplification and guess work that passes for local and national-level ‘explanations’. Comparative framing spotlights that much publically available information profiled by higher education may obscure more than it reveals across distinct methodological nationalism(s), particularly regarding changing values. Methodological advances are also featured, as they were integral to the outcomes of this study. These include our team’s focus on process and the relationship between challenges, opportunities and research team dynamics and how these resulted in the development of the HEI profile, the incorporation of social network analysis in a comparative study, along with key lessons learned, regarding research design and execution. We conclude the chapter with some of the key questions and issues we believe now come into view because of the overarching finding of the CINHEKS study. These questions and issues are important for policy makers, researchers and higher education’s most important stakeholders.

The paper will analyse the impacts of the Bologna Process (BP) on the achievement of equity and social justice in and through higher education, drawing on the experience of its implementation in Spain. It will consider especially the structural changes and emphasis on student centred teaching and learning methodology encouraged by Bologna. With regard to equity of access, process and output, we see some risks of a consequent reduction in students’ diversity and social mobility.

The main focus of this paper is the current non-university higher education institutions in the UK. They are a diverse bunch. A few are ‘universities in waiting’. But most will not expect such promotion, even if the criteria for university status continue to change. But before describing these institutions, it is necessary to set the context provided by history, both recent and ancient. The recent history concerns the ‘binary system’ of the 1970s and 1980s and in particular the characteristics of the polytechnics that provided the core of the non-university arm of that system. The ‘ancient’ concerns the traditions of state-university relationships in the United Kingdom and the unusually large degrees of autonomy enjoyed by the latter. It is with this ‘ancient history’ that we start.

About the book: In this book, an international group of leading higher education researchers draw on a wealth of social theory and comparative, empirical research to analyse current developments and their implications. Different contributions focus on different levels of higher education, the system, the institution and the academic practitioner, in different national and international contexts. However, strong common themes bind these contributions together. They include not only the significance of massification, globalisation, neo-liberalism and managerialism for the governance of higher education, its knowledge and values, but also the complexities of change processes, the importance of context and history and the strength of the stabilities that remain.

The promise of social and economic benefit, for individuals and crucially for societies, provides the main justification for increased investment in higher education in both developed and developing countries. Confidence in human capital theory continues to underpin the belief in economic benefit from higher education investment. In addition much recent writing on the rise of “knowledge economies” assigns an important role to higher education institutions. Higher education is also regarded as having the potential for contributing to other political and social changes through its support and underpinning for the institutions of civil society. This latter role is particularly important in some developing countries. Thus, higher education appears to play a central role in supporting both advanced forms of capitalism and new forms of democratic citizenship. From these perspectives, it may reasonably claim to be about nothing less than the transformation of society.