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Community engagement in higher education: is its moment finally arriving?

by Thomas Farnell

Community engagement has long occupied a curious position in higher education. Universities have been expected to contribute to society beyond teaching and research, and community engagement has existed in practice for decades. Yet it has often remained fragmented, unevenly recognised and peripheral to the policies and structures that shape what universities do.

Is this now changing? There are signs that it may be. In 2026, UNESCO became the first intergovernmental organisation to specifically name “community engagement” as one of the three missions of higher education, alongside research and teaching. At the same time, universities, European University alliances, networks and national initiatives are increasingly treating engagement not simply as a collection of activities, but as part of the core identity and mission of higher education.

An old idea, narrowed over time

Community engagement in higher education can be understood as how universities address societal needs in partnership with external communities, with “communities” encompassing public authorities, businesses, schools, civil society and citizens. The underlying idea is far from new. From their origins, universities have been fundamentally societal institutions, shaped by and responsive to external needs.

The emergence of the “third mission” in the late twentieth century reinforced the idea that universities contribute to society beyond teaching and research. However, over time, this broader societal role was increasingly subsumed under an economic narrative. The third mission came to be interpreted largely in terms of knowledge transfer, commercialisation and contribution to the knowledge economy. Economic and technological contributions took precedence over broader social and civic dimensions.

The issue, therefore, has never been the absence of engagement. Rather, community engagement has often existed without being clearly named, connected or supported as a coherent mission.

Europe’s “fourth mission”: promising, but weakly operationalised

For a period, European policy appeared to offer a possible way forward. In 2017, the European Commission referred to “civic universities” in its Renewed Agenda for Higher Education. In 2020, its vision for the European Education Area went further by introducing “service to society” as a fourth mission of higher education, complementing teaching, research and innovation and together forming a “knowledge square”.

In theory, this was promising. Distinguishing a mission focused on service to society from innovation could have created clearer space for universities’ broader social and civic role. The European Universities Initiative also seemed well placed to operationalise this ambition. Yet the results have been ambiguous. While reports on the activities on European university alliances show that community engagement initiatives are widespread across European University alliances, “service to society” has not acquired the weight one might expect from a genuine fourth mission. It is remains nested within broader agendas of innovation, society and economy, regional development or the green and digital transitions.

The problem, therefore, is not the absence of recognition of universities’ societal role, but the gap between broad mission-level ambition and narrower operationalisation.

Practice is beginning to move ahead of policy

On the ground, however, something more interesting is happening. Community engagement is not only expanding as an activity; in some cases it is being treated as a defining feature of university identity and as a strategic orientation that is acquiring institutional form.

Three European University alliances illustrate this broader move:

  • The EMERGE alliance offers perhaps the most explicit conceptual repositioning: rather than treating societal engagement as a consequence of teaching and research, it describes it as its “first mission”.
  • The EUNICoast alliance is embedding community engagement as an area of institutional development requiring evidence, reflection, planning and follow-up, including institutional reporting and action plans for all member institutions.
  • The YUFE alliance, meanwhile, positions community engagement as a transversal principle integrated across the alliance’s activities through its Community Engagement Declaration 2025–2030.

In these cases, community engagement is moving from something universities do towards something that helps define what universities are.

A recognisable field is emerging

These developments are supported by a wider transnational movement. Community engagement is increasingly acquiring the features of a recognisable field: shared concepts, methods, tools, platforms, networks, institutional examples and policy advocates. The TEFCE Toolbox provided one of the first structured European frameworks for institutional self-reflection on community engagement. Since then, further resources for action planning, university-community partnerships and community-engaged curricula have been developed and gathered through the platform www.community-engagement.eu. European networks support service-learning and community-based research, while bodies such as the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities and the UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education connect this agenda globally.

National and regional developments point in a similar direction, although unevenly. Flanders and Catalonia have substantial engagement activity but still fragmented policy frameworks. Ireland has gone further in recognising engagement alongside teaching and research and developing national support infrastructure for engagement. In the United Kingdom, the recent civic university agenda has provided new impetus for universities and communities to define shared place-based commitments.

So “practice ahead of policy” is important, but incomplete. In some systems, policy is beginning to catch up.

The time is now

If ever there was a time for universities to demonstrate their capacity to work proactively with communities in addressing complex societal challenges, it is now. And many universities are already acting. The challenge for policy is no longer simply to encourage isolated examples of good practice. It is to recognise and support the emerging infrastructure through which community engagement can become a coherent and sustainable mission of higher education.

Ultimately, the challenge is not to introduce something entirely new, but to name, define, connect and strengthen what already exists. Whether community engagement is called a third, fourth or even first mission matters less than whether it is recognised as a core mission and supported accordingly. Universities are moving. Policy now needs to catch up.

This blog is adapted from the author’s article in Policy Reviews in Higher Education: Farnell, T (2026) Community engagement in higher education: from fragmented practice to core mission?

Thomas Farnell is a Senior Education Policy Expert at the Institute for the Development of Education, an NGO based in Zagreb, Croatia. He has led a series of transnational European projects involving universities, local authorities and NGOs to enhance community engagement in higher education. Email: tfarnell@iro.hr

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The disruptive idea of the university

by Rob Cuthbert

“Ideas of the university in the public domain are hopelessly impoverished. ‘Impoverished’ because they are unduly confined to a small range of possible conceptions of the university; and ‘hopelessly’ because they are too often without hope, taking the form of either a hand-wringing over the current state of the university or merely offering a defence of the emerging nature of ‘the entrepreneurial university’.”

Fifty years on from the Robbins Report, that was how Ron Barnett began Imagining the University in 2013, and it seems that nothing much has changed since then. Stefan Collini had written a much-cited book, What are universities for?, in 2012, which as the Guardian review said (Conrad, 2012) was “heavy on hand-wringing and light on real answers”. Tom Sperlinger, Josie McLellan and Richard Pettigrew wrote Who are universities for? Remaking higher education in 2018, which despite its respectable intentions was more akin to what Barnett called a ‘defence of the emerging nature of the entrepreneurial university’, aiming in the authors’ words to “make UK universities more accessible and responsive to a changing economy.”

By 2019 Raewyn Connell was taking a rather different tack in The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change:

“… what should a ‘good university’ look like? … Raewyn Connell asks us to consider just that, challenging us to rethink the fundamentals of what universities do. Drawing on the examples offered by pioneering universities and educational reformers around the world, Connell outlines a practical vision for how our universities can become both more engaging and more productive places, driven by social good rather than profit, helping to build fairer societies.”

Simon Marginson and his colleagues in the Centre for Global Higher Education have pursued a broad programme to conceptualise and promote the idea of the public good of higher education, but in his interviews with English university leaders:

“Nearly all advocated a broad public good role … and provided examples of public outcomes in higher education. However, these concepts lacked clarity, while at the same time the shaping effects of the market were sharply understood.”

His sad conclusion was that:

“English policy on the public good outcomes of higher education has been hi-jacked, reworked, and emptied out in Treasury’s long successful drive to implement a fee-based market.”

This means that everyday pressures too often drive us back to either handwringing or apologetic entrepreneurialism, or some mixture of the two. Even Colin Riordan, one of the most thoughtful of VCs during his tenure at Cardiff, could not break the mould:

“What are universities for? Everybody knows that universities exist to educate students and help to create a highly educated workforce. Most people know they’re also the place where research is done that ends up in technologies like smartphones, fuel-efficient cars and advanced medical care. That means universities are a critical part of the innovation process.”

These ideas sell the university short, and leave their leaders and managers ill-equipped to live the values they need to protect.

We are entering an era when Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem determined to ‘move fast and break things’, as the Facebook motto once had it. Mark Zuckerberg tried to move on ten years ago to “Move fast with stable infrastructure”, but it seems that Elon Musk didn’t get the memo, as the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ cuts huge swathes through and – as it presumably hopes – out of US government. Whether or not DOGE succeeds we will soon discover, but the disregard for stable infrastructure may well prove fatal to its own efforts.

People would not normally accuse a university of moving fast, but what some might see as an excessive concern for stable infrastructure perhaps conceals the speed at which universities move to break existing ideas and understandings. The pursuit of truth may be an imperfect way to describe the aim of the university, but as an academic motivation it suffices to explain how one way of understanding will sometimes rapidly give way to another. Yes, we know that some paradigms hang on doggedly, often supported long past their sell-by date by academics with too much invested in them. But usually and eventually, often more suddenly, the truth will out.

How can universities best protect their distinctive quality, of encouraging open-minded teaching and research which will create the most favourable conditions for learning, individually and collectively? Strategies and academic values have their place, they might even constitute the stable infrastructure that is needed for a university to flourish. But the infrastructure needs to be built on a simple idea which everyone can comprehend. And that simple idea has to be infinitely flexible while staying perpetually relevant – here is one I prepared earlier:

“Many people can’t shake off the idea that management in higher education is or at least it should be about having clear objectives, and working out what to do through systematic analysis and ‘cascading’ objectives down through the organisation. They want to see the university as a rational machine, and the manager as a production controller, because Western scientistic culture has encouraged them to think that way.

The best way to deal with that way of thinking is to agree with it. You say: yes, we must focus on our key objective. In teaching our key objective is personal learning, development and growth for students, a process which cannot be well specified in advance. In research our key objective is the generation of new knowledge. So in higher education the key objective in each of our two main activities is the generation of unpredictable outcomes. Now please tell me what your key performance indicators will be.”[1]

The fundamental test of performance for a university is that it generates unpredictable outcomes. An infinitely flexible, endlessly relevant idea that everyone can understand – and always disruptive. That is why higher education matters – not just training students for the economy, not just innovation in research for economic growth. Universities need to keep generating unpredictable outcomes because that is their unique function as open public institutions, and that is what their wider society needs and deserves.

Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk. Twitter/X @RobCuthbert.

[1] Text taken from inaugural professorial lecture; Rob Cuthbert, 7 November 2007