Unveiling university-society engagement – university origin stories from Denmark

While contemporary higher education policy tends to frame the value and contribution of the university through the concept of societal impact, in this paper, we aim to widen how we understand engagement between the university and society beyond the narrow boundaries of ‘impact’. The broad challenges in demonstrating societal impact of universities, especially experienced by humanities disciplines, underscore a conceptual mismatch between the value of universities and their evaluation, and suggest that a different theorisation of the value of the university to society is worth deliberating. In this paper, we draw from Danish university origin stories to unveil the meso context in which Danish universities operate alongside other societal institutions and actors. By considering who these actors may be, what their contributions were, and why they supported the establishment of universities, we bring to light a hidden and more nuanced aspect of university-society engagement – one that is dynamic, reciprocal, and conceptually embedded into what the university is as an actor within society and the world. Such a historically-informed understanding of university-society engagement offers a richer, more complex approach which may apply to alternative future policy framings, to more accurately capture the significance of the university to society and vice versa.