Multi-site universities face the challenge of integrating campuses that may have different profiles and orientations arising from place-specific attachments. Multi-campus universities created via mergers seeking to ensure long-term financial sustainability, and increasing their attractiveness to students, create a tension in campuses' purposes. We explore how mergers in Wales created 'inadvertent' multi-campus universities whilst attempting to increase their overall competitiveness. We highlight three tensions that mergers created for contributing to local places, firstly a tendency for internal concentration, investing for growth in metropolitan not peripheral campuses; secondly, to looking beyond traditional local campuses and creating external campuses (in this case in London); and thirdly, to specialise campuses on the basis of attracting external students not local needs. This creates a substantial challenge for managing multi-campus universities if they are to continue to be able to support the prosperity of more remote regions in an increasingly knowledge-based economy.

In this working paper we present an analysis of the merger process in Wales in the period from 2002-2012. The mergers were initiated to reduce the overall number of universities as part of an effort to increase the overall competiveness of the Welsh higher education system in the wider United Kingdom higher education system. The Welsh merger structural reforms have been analysed by using a governance approach to HE mergers. The aim is to understand whether the structural reform process can be understood as functioning as an open method of coordination. The OMC can provide a conceptualization of bottom-up driven merger processes. This is certainly the case for countries like the UK where universities have high levels of institutional autonomy. Various elements of the OMC approach can be detected in Welsh merger reforms. The structural reforms provided for strong coordination and also strong initiative taken by the universities themselves. It is difficult to determine whether the coordinated mergers have been successful. On the one hand, it reduced the overall number of universities. The capacity of the system has improved and the average size of the institutions has increased. On the other hand, the desired end point of six institutions has not been met and the average size of the institutions remains relatively low in the UK context.

There is an awareness that the civic mission is important for universities and higher education in general, and there is also a growing interest for the specifics on the regional engagement mission. University regional engagement involves complex webs of interactions within loosely-coupled knowledge communities that consistently defy simplistic enumeration and measurement. Under circumstances where what can be measured and strategically managed comes to become what matters for the university, then the quotidian reality of the university is that civic and regional engagement missions are not taken seriously either by university staff or management. It is this conundrum that this chapter addresses.

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