Book Review

Goddard and Vallance divided the book into three parts. They first started with the role of the civic university, then moved to show what the role of such institutions is. The book then focus on showing the challenges of these universities leadership and management towards maximizing their contribution towards civil society both locally and globally.

With the growing demand for civic engagement, "Civic University" try to develop a model of on this issue. The book compares experiences, and idea of a normative model that seeks to contribute to the public good as responsibility of the university and with focus on research, teaching, and service essential high-quality programs. Thus, the authors show how the overlap between teaching and engagement results along with the outreach activities enriches student experience. This overlap connects theory to practice that leads to socio-economic benefits.

The book was successful in bringing lots of models from different universities, it even compared models within the same university and how transformation happened towards 'new' university. The book focused on changing a conservative established capital city university to a new organizational model.

The book even went into describing location and greenfield site of universities with focus on how these factors can be an attraction of international investors and academic staff. "Civic University" as per the work of Goddard and Vallance (2016) should be a major source of capacity building of an innovative ecosystem, however with less pressure on short term income generation. "Civic Universities" should have distinctive model of funding companies that would reach the university research base in a mechanism based on — a demand pull rather than supply push model — connected with the network of regionally orientated universities of applied sciences.

The tables in the book and specially those focused on universities transformation can work a reference framework or action plans that can be followed during universities change management programs. For example, one of the tables shows how the university can measure its mindset transformation from elite to mass and then to universal model.

The book have many different approaches about universities competitive differentiations, however the most interesting case is the multi-disciplined teaching that is happening between the colleges of Arts, Science, Technology and Business Schools. However, the book failed to address clearly how universities can have well established Return on Capital Employed (ROCE) along with clear profit centres, even though it mentioned few ideas as establishing Science Shops for the community as one way of community driven engagement programs.

Today many universities are competing to be drivers of regional change with many similar examples as mentioned earlier, however the work of this book can be considered unique in trying to set a framework of what future leadership in Civic Universities should be or should find more opportunities in. Therefore, this book can be good reference for academic institution strategic planning teams and academic disruptive education researchers whom seeking to think in different context and targeting to create another opportunities for their communities and the rest of the world.