There is something unsettling about reading a university research restructuring document that repeatedly speaks the language of “financial sustainability”, “income generation”, “strategic alignment” and “performance”, while saying remarkably little about knowledge, intellectual life or the civic purpose of research itself.

Like many colleagues across UK higher education, I have now lived through years of restructuring, review processes, strategic realignments and institutional “transformation”. Yet after each new review, many staff are left asking the same question:

What, fundamentally, is the university

trying to be?

This question feels particularly pressing within institutions that continue to describe themselves as civic universities and registered charities committed to public benefit. Historically, the civic university represented something important: education and research as public goods, rooted in communities, social contribution and intellectual life beyond narrow market value. Civic institutions were not perfect, but they carried a broader social imagination about the role universities could play in democratic and public life.

Increasingly, however, universities appear governed through a different logic.

Across the sector, institutional value is framed through recruitment markets, income generation, research recovery costs, performance metrics, league tables and strategic concentration. The language of collegiality has gradually been replaced by the language of portfolio management. Staff become “workforce planning”. Research becomes “income sustainability”. Students become markets and recruitment streams.

The latest restructuring proposals at my own institution reflect these tensions clearly. A proposed review of research places dozens of colleagues into a university-wide selection pool assessed through criteria such as research income, outputs, strategic alignment and impact. Elsewhere, disciplines and services central to university life, including History, Economics and Campus Life, face ongoing threats and uncertainty.

Of course universities must be financially sustainable. Nobody seriously disputes that. But sustainability is not a neutral concept. The important question is what happens when financial sustainability becomes the primary organising principle through which academic value itself is judged.

What kinds of research survive under those conditions?

What happens to scholarship that is socially important but less commercially attractive? What happens to long-term intellectual work that may not generate immediate measurable impact? What happens to disciplines whose value lies partly in critique, historical understanding, democratic reflection or civic culture rather than external income capture?

These questions matter because universities are not simply businesses that happen to teach classes and produce publications. They are public institutions with social responsibilities, educational missions and obligations that extend beyond market logic alone.

There is also a human dimension to this process that institutional documents rarely acknowledge. Repeated cycles of review and restructuring produce uncertainty, exhaustion and institutional distrust. Staff are asked to continue performing professionalism, collegiality and commitment while simultaneously navigating environments of prolonged precarity. Over time, this reshapes academic culture itself. People become more cautious, less collaborative and less willing to invest emotionally in institutions that increasingly treat employment as conditional upon fluctuating strategic priorities.

Perhaps most striking is the absence of any clear intellectual vision beneath many contemporary restructuring exercises. Staff are told repeatedly that institutions must become more “strategic”, “focused” and “aligned”, yet often remain unclear about the underlying academic project these processes are supposedly serving.

A civic university cannot simply be defined by branding or mission statements. It is defined by the values embedded in institutional decision-making: what kinds of knowledge are protected, what forms of labour are valued and whether universities continue to understand themselves primarily as public institutions or increasingly as competitive market actors.

That tension now sits at the heart of contemporary higher education. And many staff across the sector can feel it every day.