The creation of a new super university in South East England, through the merger of Kent and Greenwich, signals both a turning point and a warning.
Advocates see consolidation as the promise of scale and resilience.
Critics fear homogenisation, loss of identity, and narrowing of choice.
Both could be right.
What matters most is not the merger itself but the logic that underpins it. In the absence of a shared national mission for higher education, mergers are now framed as solutions: a form of market rationalisation presented as vision.
The vacuum where mission should be
Since the 2012 funding reforms, higher education has been treated less as civic infrastructure and more as a competitive market. Public investment was replaced by loans. Students were told to think like investors. Degrees became receipts.
Into the gap left by an absence of national purpose rushed hyper-regulation: metrics, thresholds, and questions of fiscal viability. Within this narrowed frame, mergers appear logical. Bigger looks cheaper. Consolidation looks like progress. But without a shared mission, the deeper questions go unanswered.
The long contraction
For much of the last century, almost every town in Britain had its own art school: civic in origin, modest in scale, and rooted in place. In the 1960s there were over 150 across England. Over time, that dispersed civic network was redrawn. Some schools were absorbed into polytechnics, some federated into new structures, many disappeared.
From this history, four models emerged: the consolidated metropolitan brand, uniting multiple colleges under one identity; the regional federation spread across towns and cities; the specialist regional provider rooted in place; and the art school absorbed into a larger university. All four persist, but history shows how quickly the civic and regional variants were erased in the pursuit of scale. That remains the risk.
The limits of consolidation
Super universities are most often justified through promises of efficiency and resilience. The patterns of merger and acquisition are familiar, exercised through cuts, closures, and the stripping back of provision. Contraction is presented as progress.
And what follows: a merger into an “Ultra Super University”, a “Mega University”? The logic of consolidation always points in that direction. Fewer institutions. The illusion that size solves structural problems.
But what if the future of universities is regional, hybrid and networked? Do mergers enable this? Or do they reduce it, by erasing local presence in the pursuit of efficiency?
The risk is not only that provision shrinks, but that our regional and civic anchors are lost. A university’s resilience lies not in the absence of difference but in its presence: in the tolerance of variety, the recognition of locality, and the capacity to sustain attachment.
Federation of art schools
UCA grew from a federation of art schools, distributed rather than centralised, holding to a civic model of place. This has been hard to sustain in today’s free market. However, our University has become a place for those who find belonging in community, for outliers and outsiders at home in the intimacy of a civic setting, rather than the intensity of the metropolis. Our resilience shows how creative specialist schools can generate strength from vulnerability. Our story also foreshadows the systemic pressures now confronting universities everywhere.
The Kent–Greenwich merger now brings new possibilities for Medway, positioned between Greenwich and Kent and home to a university campus for them both. If approached with care, it could restore creative presence to a place long on the periphery.
Our civic project persists at Canterbury School of Art, Architecture and Design. Our founder, Sidney Cooper, a local painter, established Canterbury’s School of Art in 1868 as a gift to the city. It has survived every reform since. In the 1960s it moved into a modernist building, future-facing yet rooted in the Garden of England.
That identity carried it through polytechnic consolidation, university expansion, and marketisation. It remains its strength now: an art school for the city, of the city, and in the city. Creativity is lived as much as it is taught.
A human-sized proposition
For us at UCA Canterbury, the alternative is clear. Ours is a human-sized proposition: intimate, civic, distinctive. A place where students are known by name, where teaching is close, and where creativity is inseparable from civic life.
We intend that our graduates remain in creative professions for life, not because of economies of scale but because of the depth of their formation. Small institutions enable what scale cannot: intimacy, belonging, and the tolerance of difference. They cultivate attachment to place, the character of community, and the fragile conditions in which nuture and trust can grow. These are not marginal gains. They are the essence of education itself. Vulnerability, when named and advocated for, becomes strength.
This is the measure against which any super university must be judged: not whether it scales, but whether it sustains the human scale within it. The crisis in higher education is not only financial but cultural. It is about whether universities can still act as places of meaning, attachment, and public need.
Our founder, Sidney Cooper, understood in 1868 that education was not about scale but about purpose. That mission still speaks. In the shadow of consolidation and the spectre of Artificial Intelligence, what must endure is the human scale of learning and belonging.
To sustain it is a choice we must keep making.
