The University of Cambridge is a big deal. Together with its 31 colleges, it owns a significant proportion of the land of the city, either directly operating as university or college buildings or indirectly as landlords.

This is an often tense setup that ends up being portrayed as a town/gown clash, with cloistered academics being pitched in opposition to a working class town under the yoke of intellectuals. The reality is obviously a lot more complicated, but it is worth noting that disputes (customary right of way and access being curtailed, congestion charging, Grantchester Meadows, actions of students in burning money in front of homeless people) are often received in a way that understands and reinforces the university as a bad neighbour and a poor citizen.

And, they have a point.

For one thing, aside from the disputes mentioned above, it churns out PhDs in computer science which mean that Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, ARM and a host of other spinouts and famous tech companies have branches here. That affects the city’s wealth disparities (it certainly isn’t university pay doing that) and thus its housing market. The externalities of having a world class university on your doorstep are real and expensive.

But, for locals, there are also advantages.

The university also acts as something akin to a public body with its host city. There are, depending on how you count, at least nine university run museum/gallery/botanic garden spaces (and a good number of college art galleries and special collections). The city council runs none. As a city, we have three other museums, all of which are run by trusts and benefit from the network effect of having a load of museum workers in town who need to top up their hours and pay.

The university sits on the governor’s group for the local hospital, and the biomedical campus that the university supports gives access to more treatments than if we were just a normal market town. It also runs festivals with free events for families just as the council cancelled its Big Weekend (which also used to feature free outreach activities from the university and museums). It has recently been in the news with plans to develop a heat network for the city centre, it ran covid testing and vaccination, it runs several bus routes, it put forward the land and cash for building a suburb, and then runs its primary school.

Having said, I think that a lot of things that the university does that benefit the city are essentially by accident. As in; the public benefit of what the university provides for the city is often not the first consideration, the public benefit is a byproduct. The reason I think this is that each of these services seems to be a bit of an afterthought in terms of the design of delivery and even things like the museums are supported by Arts Council funding (although much less so in the latest round) to an extent that isn’t really in keeping with the resources, scope and ambition of the university.

I want to propose something better.

I think the university could be clear in its offer to the city. A manifesto even. A promise? What can it offer the city that makes it the best place to be? More housing. More transport. More things that make the high cost of living bearable. More understanding that its work is built on the labour of low paid staff who need ameliorations.

Now, lots of these individual institutions have public involvement mechanisms: trustees, collectives, user groups. But, imagine instead if the university (which has pretty robust democratic structures for taking internal decisions) were to engage in a deliberative democratic process (something like citizens assemblies, but I’m not fussy about what) to understand where its priorities for services provided to staff and students coincide with services needed by people in the city. Could the university think about how it designs services with users rather than the model of allowing the town to use the gown?

“The lesson is that being excellent on a global scale begins with being excellent in the neighborhood.” Denning, Peter J, Dunham, Robert and Brown, John Seely (2010) The Innovator's Way.

The city will keep growing, and the university needs to grow and adapt with it. It needs to be more purposeful than a sort of “will this do” approach. That means strategy, money and focus. It’s the least the city deserves.