Abstract
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.
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Notes
- 1.
In the UK, a Higher Education—Business and Community Interaction (HE–BCI) survey has been conducted annually since 1999 by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) for HEFCE, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) and the Department for Employment and Learning (DELNI). It focuses on ‘specific interactions with external partners, such as contract and collaborative research, consultancy, continuing professional development and intellectual property’ (HEFCE 2014). The survey has informed funding allocations for third stream activities of universities through the Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) since 2006.
- 2.
The six beacons were university-based collaborative centres that were set up in 2008 to support, recognise, reward and build capacity for public engagement, with a lifespan of four years. Details of the initiative are available at https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/nccpe-projects-and-services/completed-projects/beacons-public-engagement (accessed November2017).
- 3.
The economic output of the region was in 2008 (at the time of our fieldwork) almost £119 billion, which represented 13% of the total UK gross value added (GVA), the third largest of the nine English regions (Young and Sly 2011). Northville, where Glocal U is established, accounts for over half the population of the region and incorporates over half of its industrial capacity and service activities.
- 4.
The Russell Group is a membership interest organisation currently comprising 24 of the most reputed and selective universities in the UK.
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Brennan, J., Cochrane, A., Lebeau, Y., Williams, R. (2018). Universities, Community Engagement and the ‘Public Good’. In: The University in its Place. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1296-3_6
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