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.