Why is it so hard for universities—and academics in particular—to engage meaningfully with the public?

This is a question that circulates constantly in policy documents, funding calls, and strategy meetings, usually accompanied by an assumption that the problem is one of will, communication, or technique. If only academics spoke more plainly; if only they left their ivory towers; if only they learned to “listen better”. And yet, for those of us who have spent sustained periods attempting genuine public engagement, the difficulty feels deeper, more structural, and more uncomfortable than this narrative allows.

In my own experience, public engagement tends to fail in two opposite and equally frustrating ways.

At one extreme, we engage with people who already broadly agree with us. These are often local residents, cultural workers, activists, heritage groups, or professionals whose values align closely with our own. Conversations are warm, intelligent, and affirming. There is a shared language of care, public good, sustainability, and critique of marketisation. But there is also a sense of circularity. We are speaking with people who already see the problems we see, reinforcing existing convictions rather than extending the civic reach of the university.

At the other extreme, when we attempt to engage beyond this circle—into communities whose values, political orientations, or moral frameworks diverge more sharply—the encounter is often strained, partial, or short-lived. Dialogue becomes harder to sustain. We find ourselves confronting commitments we cannot endorse: hostility to pluralism, suspicion of expertise, instrumental views of education, or moral assumptions that cut against our own.

These tensions have become especially visible in my own civic regeneration work in Southport, where university-linked engagement involves not only cultural participation but also difficult negotiations across class, political, and institutional boundaries.

This produces a pervasive dilemma: public engagement demands either less than it should or more than it can. Universities, meanwhile, continue to insist that engagement is a universal good, a frictionless add-on to existing academic roles. What they rarely acknowledge is that genuine public engagement is exhausting work. It requires time, emotional labour, patience, and repeated exposure to disappointment.

Instead, public engagement is often rhetorically valorised while being structurally undermined. Academics are encouraged to “reach out,” but only in ways that do not threaten institutional reputations, managerial authority, or funding streams.

There is a deeper tension running through all of this. Public engagement is often imagined as an unqualified good, but in practice it places academics in situations of moral strain, uncertainty, and partial failure. It exposes the limits of shared language, the fragility of trust, and the reality that not all disagreements can be resolved through dialogue. These are not problems of technique or attitude; they are structural features of civic life itself.

The alternative, however, is not disengagement. Rather, it requires a more honest reckoning with what public engagement actually entails: that it is slow, uneven, and frequently frustrating; that it involves encounters which do not culminate in agreement or affirmation; and that its value lies less in immediate outcomes than in the cultivation of durable relationships and mutual recognition over time.

The paradox is that enduring this frustration may be the price of a different kind of autonomy. In the absence of sustained public alignment, universities increasingly rely on fragile and indirect sources of legitimacy. Public-facing work is then filtered through expanding layers of ethical review, safeguarding protocols, risk assessments, and reputational management—often well intentioned, but collectively corrosive. Engagement is rendered safe by being proceduralised and in the process much of its substance, responsiveness, and civic urgency is lost.

When public support thins, universities become easier to marginalise or reshape, not through overt political intervention but through the quiet accumulation of compliance requirements that make meaningful engagement prohibitively slow, cautious, or uninteresting. What remains is activity without encounter, consultation without consequence, and ethics without content.

By contrast, institutions that remain genuinely entangled with public life—even at the cost of discomfort, disagreement, and imperfect outcomes—retain a broader base of legitimacy. Such institutions are harder to hollow out through procedural means alone. Civic frustration, in this sense, is not a failure to be managed away, but a condition of remaining publicly consequential.

The question, then, is not whether public engagement is difficult. It clearly is. But rather, the question is whether universities are willing to submit to that difficulty—or whether they will continue to demand civic relevance without paying its costs.