The Civic University: When the Brand Outlives the Purpose

An examination of civic responsibility, organisational identity and the psychology of university management

There is something rather curious about the way British universities have embraced the language of civic and cultural responsibility. Browse their strategic plans and you will encounter familiar commitments to community engagement, cultural enrichment, regional prosperity and public good. Universities are presented not simply as places of teaching and research, but as important custodians of the social and intellectual life of the communities they serve.

All very reassuring. Yet at the same time, we see institutions closing humanities programmes, withdrawing cultural provision and, in some cases, removing the very facilities through which their civic responsibilities have historically been discharged.

This raises an awkward question. How can an institution continue to promote its civic and cultural identity while simultaneously reducing some of the activities that give that identity substance?

The temptation is to call it hypocrisy. I initially thought that myself. However, the more interesting explanation may lie in the psychology of organisations and the way universities have come to manage competing priorities.

Hypocrisy implies a degree of conscious inconsistency. It suggests that those making the claims know they are misleading their audience. That may occasionally be true, but it is not something we can reasonably establish from a university's marketing material or restructuring decisions.

Instead, I want to consider the possibility that universities are becoming increasingly adept at maintaining an institutional identity that is no longer consistently reflected in their operational decisions. Not necessarily because managers are dishonest, but because the systems through which universities now operate encourage precisely this separation.

And that, I suspect, is a more interesting problem.

A university with several personalities

One of the difficulties in examining university management is the tendency to treat the institution as though it were a single, coherent entity. We refer to what a university believes, values or intends, when in reality it consists of numerous groups with different responsibilities, incentives and understandings of institutional purpose.

Consider a fairly ordinary restructuring exercise.

A finance director examines the cost of maintaining an underused theatre. The building requires considerable capital investment, its operating expenditure is rising and the income generated does not cover its costs. The conclusion that continued operation is financially unsustainable may be entirely reasonable.

Elsewhere, a marketing team promotes the university's contribution to local cultural life. This, too, may be entirely reasonable. The institution has a long history of supporting cultural activity and continues to participate in community partnerships.

Meanwhile, academics and members of the surrounding community argue that closing the theatre represents a significant cultural loss. Their concerns may be equally legitimate.

Each group is evaluating the institution through a different set of criteria.

The finance director is concerned with financial viability. The marketing department is concerned with institutional identity and reputation. Academics and community members may place greater weight on educational, intellectual and cultural value.

None of these positions is necessarily wrong.

The difficulty is that universities increasingly appear to lack a convincing mechanism for reconciling them.

Shields and Watermeyer (2020) examined competing institutional logics within UK universities, identifying tensions between academic autonomy, utilitarianism and managerialism. Their work is useful because it challenges the assumption that a university operates according to a single, universally understood purpose.

Indeed, what constitutes a successful university may differ considerably depending upon whom one asks.

Perhaps this is why the contradictions surrounding civic responsibility can persist without being recognised as contradictions at all. The decisions are internally consistent within their respective managerial domains. It is only when we examine the institution as a whole that the inconsistency becomes apparent.

When institutional identity becomes detached from activity

This problem has a well-established theoretical foundation.

Meyer and Rowan (1977) argued that organisations often adopt formal structures and practices because these reflect socially accepted expectations. Such arrangements help organisations establish legitimacy, even when the relationship between their formal commitments and everyday activities is less straightforward.

They described this separation as organisational decoupling.

For a contemporary university, a civic strategy may serve several legitimate purposes. It communicates an institutional commitment to public service, provides a framework for community partnerships and reinforces the idea that higher education contributes something beyond individual qualifications and economic output.

However, the existence of such a strategy does not necessarily tell us how much influence civic responsibility has when difficult decisions are made.

A university might describe cultural engagement as central to its identity while evaluating the future of a theatre almost entirely through projected expenditure and financial returns.

The theatre and the civic strategy may be considered by different committees, assessed through different reporting systems and judged against quite different measures of success.

There is no requirement for anyone involved to be deliberately misleading. The separation can arise from the organisational structure itself.

Bromley and Powell (2012) offer a particularly useful refinement. They distinguish between the familiar problem of policies becoming detached from practice and a second form of decoupling in which organisational activities become detached from their intended outcomes.

The distinction is important.

A university may genuinely undertake civic activities, employ staff to support them and faithfully report its achievements. Yet its wider resource-allocation processes may still be poorly aligned with the civic purposes it claims to advance.

In other words, the difficulty may not be that universities are failing to do what they say. It may be that they are doing numerous things successfully without adequately considering whether those activities, taken together, still serve their declared purposes.

The evidence behind the uncomfortable questions

Recent examples illustrate why this deserves attention.

In September 2026, King's College London announced the conclusion of its King's Culture programme after fourteen years of connecting academic research, cultural practice and public audiences. The university explicitly attributed the decision to changing strategic priorities and a shift in Higher Education Innovation Fund priorities towards economic and industrial outcomes (King's College London, 2026).

It would be unfair to interpret this as King's abandoning cultural engagement altogether. The university continues to support other forms of public engagement.

Nevertheless, the explanation is revealing. A programme that had made a substantial contribution to cultural and public engagement became less compatible with the changing strategic and funding priorities of the institution.

At Ulster University, the decision to cease theatre operations at the Riverside Theatre in Coleraine offers another example. Its July 2025 equality-screening documentation reported that the building required an estimated £23 million rebuild, alongside £745,000 in immediate expenditure and approximately £495,000 in annual running costs (Ulster University, 2025).

These are not trivial figures.

The university also explored the possibility of transferring responsibility for the theatre to the local council. This is an important qualification because it demonstrates that the financial decision was not necessarily a straightforward rejection of cultural responsibility.

Nevertheless, the withdrawal of a long-established civic asset raises questions about where responsibility for its loss ultimately resides.

A third example comes from the University of Leicester, which confirmed in March 2026 that Film Studies and Modern Languages degree programmes would close to new entrants from the 2026/27 academic year. The decision formed part of a wider strategic review intended to strengthen financial sustainability (University of Leicester, 2026).

Again, the distinction between removing a degree programme and eliminating all related provision matters. Leicester confirmed that language learning would continue through its Languages at Leicester programme.

These examples are not proof of widespread institutional decoupling. Nor are they sufficient to establish that the universities concerned have reduced their overall civic contribution.

What they demonstrate is that activities with cultural, educational or civic significance can become vulnerable when institutional priorities change.

The wider consequences are not necessarily confined to the individual university. The British Academy (2025) identified geographical gaps in access to arts, humanities and social science subjects, with particular implications for students whose circumstances make studying away from home difficult.

The disappearance of a programme from one university prospectus may represent an inconvenience to some applicants. To others, it may remove a realistic opportunity to study that subject altogether.

That difference is central to any meaningful discussion of civic responsibility.

The accountant is not necessarily the villain

There is an uncomfortable tendency in academic commentary to portray finance professionals and university executives as individuals who simply fail to understand the value of education.

I am not convinced that this is particularly helpful.

Universities are expensive organisations to operate. They maintain substantial estates, employ large numbers of staff, provide specialist facilities and must make financial commitments extending many years into the future.

They cannot fund every activity indefinitely, regardless of demand or cost.

The Office for Students (2026) reported that 35.8% of English higher education providers recorded deficits in 2024–25, with 42.7% forecast to do so in 2025–26. The figures also revealed considerable variation between institutions, making it equally misleading to suggest that every university faces the same financial difficulties.

A responsible finance director cannot simply disregard those circumstances.

Indeed, maintaining an unsustainable programme or building may threaten other activities, including those that contribute substantially to the public good.

The problem is therefore not that financial considerations enter university decision-making. They absolutely must.

The more interesting question concerns what happens when financial measures become the dominant means through which institutional value is judged.

A theatre has readily identifiable operating costs. A humanities department has staffing expenditure, recruitment numbers and projected income. These figures can be entered into a spreadsheet, compared and presented to a governing body.

The longer-term cultural and educational consequences of removing such provision are much more difficult to express in comparable terms.

How does one calculate the value of a theatre to a local community over thirty years? What financial measure adequately captures the disappearance of the only reasonably accessible modern languages degree in a particular region?

Those are difficult questions, but difficulty does not make the underlying value disappear.

Nor does the absence of an easily calculated financial return imply the absence of a return altogether.

This is where management psychology becomes particularly relevant. Organisations increasingly govern themselves through measures that make particular forms of performance visible. Activities that fit those measures become easier to justify, while those producing less tangible benefits struggle to demonstrate their contribution.

The danger is that what is measurable gradually becomes confused with what is valuable.

The peculiar psychology of institutional success

There is another possibility worth considering.

Organisations are not necessarily good at recognising when the systems they have developed to achieve their objectives begin to determine those objectives.

Merton's (1957) analysis of bureaucratic behaviour helps explain how rules and procedures can acquire an importance that exceeds the purposes they were originally designed to serve.

Consider financial sustainability.

It is an essential condition for a university to continue functioning. Without sufficient income, the institution cannot educate students, conduct research or contribute to the community.

But financial sustainability is a means of maintaining the institution, not a complete explanation of why the institution exists.

If every decision is ultimately judged by its contribution to financial sustainability, there is a danger that the relationship becomes inverted.

The university no longer seeks financial stability in order to fulfil its educational and civic purposes. Instead, educational and civic activities are increasingly expected to justify their existence through their contribution to financial stability.

This distinction may appear subtle, but its implications are considerable.

It also produces a psychological problem for employees.

Academics and professional services staff may have entered higher education because they identified with its intellectual, educational or public-service responsibilities. When institutional decisions appear increasingly inconsistent with those values, the resulting conflict may be experienced as something more substantial than disagreement over resource allocation.

It may represent a challenge to their understanding of the institution to which they have devoted their working lives.

For management, such reactions can be interpreted as resistance to change. For employees, they may represent an attempt to preserve what they regard as the institution's purpose.

Both interpretations can coexist, although neither should be assumed to explain every instance of opposition.

The dispute is not always about whether change is necessary. Sometimes it concerns what the university is being changed into.

Selling the university to itself

The marketing dimension deserves particular attention because it introduces a further complication.

From a marketing perspective, the civic university is an attractive proposition.

It offers an identity that distinguishes the institution from an ordinary commercial provider. It speaks to regional pride, historical continuity, public service and cultural belonging. It also provides a reassuring narrative for students, employees, alumni, local government and potential partners.

There is nothing inherently objectionable about this.

Universities genuinely do contribute to their communities, and communicating those contributions is entirely legitimate.

The difficulty arises when the institutional image becomes more stable than the activities upon which it was originally built.

Gioia et al. (2000) examined the relationship between organisational identity and image, arguing that institutional identity can be more adaptable than traditionally assumed. Organisations continually interpret and reinterpret who they are, partly in response to how they wish to be perceived.

This offers an interesting way of understanding the civic university.

An institution may withdraw from particular cultural activities while retaining a broader civic identity. The narrative can be adapted to emphasise other forms of engagement, perhaps regional economic development, business partnerships or employability.

Some of those activities may deliver considerable public benefit. There is no reason to dismiss them simply because they differ from traditional cultural provision.

But there is a problem if the changing narrative obscures the fact that certain civic responsibilities have been reduced, transferred or abandoned.

The university may continue to describe itself as a cultural institution because its history supports that description, even when its current activities no longer support it to the same extent.

This does not necessarily amount to false advertising. Organisational identities are rarely so precise that they can be declared true or false in a straightforward manner.

Yet it does raise a question about the relationship between reputation and responsibility.

Suchman (1995) distinguished between pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimacy. Universities benefit not only from providing services that people value, but also from being recognised as institutions whose activities are socially appropriate and whose continued existence is taken for granted.

The language of civic responsibility contributes to this legitimacy.

It would be commercially naïve for universities to disregard that advantage.

But the ability to maintain a desirable public identity should not be confused with evidence that the activities underpinning it have been preserved.

In that respect, clever marketing and organisational decoupling can be difficult to distinguish from the outside.

Who is responsible for the things that do not pay?

There is a further complication, and one that I think is too often overlooked.

We should not assume that a university has an obligation to maintain every cultural or educational activity it has ever provided. Institutions change, populations change and the resources available to support particular activities change with them.

Nor should we assume that universities are solely responsible for sustaining local cultural infrastructure. Local authorities, governments, funding bodies and community organisations all have a part to play.

The question is how these responsibilities are negotiated.

If a university has supported a theatre for fifty years, it has helped establish that theatre as part of the community's cultural life. Withdrawing from that arrangement may be financially defensible, but it does not follow that the consequences cease to be relevant to the university.

Similarly, a decision to close a degree programme may make sense when examined through institutional recruitment figures, while producing educational disadvantages at a regional level.

The scale at which a decision is evaluated therefore matters.

What appears rational within the financial boundaries of one institution may be considerably less satisfactory when examined in relation to the wider community.

This is not an argument for universities to disregard financial discipline. Rather, it is an argument for making the social consequences of financial decisions visible.

If an institution intends to present itself as a civic university, there ought to be some identifiable relationship between that claim and the criteria through which its decisions are evaluated.

Otherwise, civic responsibility becomes something that is celebrated in strategic documents but carries uncertain weight when resources are allocated.

Perhaps a more useful approach would be to ask not simply how much an activity costs, but what obligations the institution has assumed through providing it, what consequences would follow from its removal and whether realistic alternatives exist.

None of this guarantees that a programme or cultural facility should remain open.

It does, however, require the university to account for the civic consequences of its decisions rather than treating them as unfortunate externalities.

When the brand outlives the purpose

The interesting thing about the civic university is that the contradiction may not be especially visible to those working within it.

A marketing team can sincerely promote the institution's cultural contribution. A finance director can responsibly recommend withdrawing an expensive facility. Academic leaders can genuinely believe that the university remains committed to its public responsibilities.

Each may be acting competently and conscientiously.

Yet the combined outcome may be an institution that retains much of the language and symbolism of civic responsibility while progressively changing what that responsibility means in practice.

I am not suggesting that universities have ceased to serve the public good. Far from it. Their contributions to education, research, healthcare, professional training and regional development remain substantial.

Nor am I arguing that humanities departments or university theatres possess some automatic right to survive regardless of circumstances.

My concern is rather more fundamental.

If civic responsibility is genuinely part of a university's purpose, it ought to influence decisions even when the resulting choices are financially uncomfortable.

That does not mean every civic activity must be retained. It means that its value should be considered, and any loss acknowledged, rather than allowing financial criteria alone to determine the outcome.

There is a difference between an institution that reluctantly withdraws a civic activity after weighing its wider consequences and one in which those consequences scarcely feature in the decision.

Both may arrive at the same financial outcome. Only one has clearly demonstrated that civic responsibility played a meaningful part in reaching it.

Perhaps this is the test we ought to apply when universities declare their civic credentials.

Not how many partnerships they announce, how frequently the word community appears in their strategic plans or how enthusiastically they celebrate their cultural heritage.

Rather, what weight do those commitments actually carry when difficult decisions have to be made?

The university that closes a theatre because it cannot afford to maintain it may have made a perfectly reasonable decision. But the university that continues to trade upon its historical cultural contribution without adequately acknowledging what has been lost presents a rather different problem.

The former concerns financial sustainability. The latter concerns institutional identity.

And it is the relationship between the two that interests me.

I began by asking whether universities were being hypocritical or simply clever in their marketing. On reflection, I suspect neither explanation is sufficient.

The more unsettling possibility is that universities can genuinely believe in their civic responsibilities while developing managerial systems that progressively weaken their influence.

An organisation does not have to abandon its principles explicitly for those principles to lose their authority.

Sometimes it simply changes the way decisions are made.

And perhaps that is the real danger for the civic university: not that its managers have stopped believing in the public good, but that the institution has become increasingly capable of functioning without having to account for it.

References

Bromley, P., & Powell, W. W. (2012). From smoke and mirrors to walking the talk: Decoupling in the contemporary world. Academy of Management Annals, 6(1), 483–530. https://doi.org/10.1080/19416520.2012.684462

Gioia, D. A., Schultz, M., & Corley, K. G. (2000). Organizational identity, image, and adaptive instability. Academy of Management Review, 25(1), 63–81. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2000.2791603

King's College London. (2026, September 22). King's Culture programme comes to an end. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/kings-culture-programme-comes-to-an-end

Merton, R. K. (1957). Bureaucratic structure and personality. In Social theory and social structure (rev. and enlarged ed., pp. 195–206). Free Press.

Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), 340–363. https://doi.org/10.1086/226550

Office for Students. (2026). Financial sustainability of higher education providers in England: 2026. https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/financial-sustainability-of-higher-education-providers-in-england-2026/

Shields, R., & Watermeyer, R. (2020). Competing institutional logics in universities in the United Kingdom: Schism in the church of reason. Studies in Higher Education, 45(1), 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2018.1504910

Suchman, M. C. (1995). Managing legitimacy: Strategic and institutional approaches. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 571–610. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1995.9508080331

The British Academy. (2025). Cold spots: Mapping inequality in SHAPE provision in UK higher education. https://doi.org/10.5871/shape/cold-spots-mapping-inequality

Ulster University. (2025, July 4). Equality screening pro-forma: Decision to cease theatre operations at the Riverside Theatre from 31 July 2025. https://www.ulster.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/1782071/Screening-Pro-forma-Riverside-Theatre.pdf

University of Leicester. (2026, March 5). Strategic review: Outcomes for College of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities. https://le.ac.uk/news/2026/march/strategic-review-outcomes-college-social-sciences-arts-humanities