Universities as social and cultural infrastructure: Summary of roundtable discussion

This can be linked within them, contribute to social and cultural to a growing awareness of the importance of devolution to infrastructure, and how can this contribution be levelling up and the role that universities can play as anchor articulated, measured and evidenced? institutions tying down the global in the local and supporting • How can universities work with other institutions to a fairer. [...] There was and geographies some discussion of universities in the White Paper, but they were mostly understood as contributing to human The ways in which universities form part of, and engage and local knowledge, and also as contributing at the national with, their local social and cultural infrastructures are level more than the local level. [...] For example, in some towns and cities there is an functioning as social and cultural infrastructure is to find increasing sense that the local social and cultural infrastructure ways of building bridges between temporary and permanent is not working – the transport system is perceived as in inhabitants of a place. [...] At a physical level whether a university and institutions, where a key part of the role is for the is located within or outside a town or city can be a factor, postholder to be the conduit between the university and as can the extent to which a university’s campus is seen as these other organisations. [...] For this type of partnership to be successful universities need to be able to be flexible in terms of Universities as social and cultural infrastructure: Summary of roundtable discussion 6 List of Participants Professor Dominic Abrams FBA OBE Professor of Social Psychology and the Director of the Centre for the Study of Group Processes, University of Kent Professor Robin Banerjee Pro Vice-Chancell.