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As we mark our 125th anniversary and look ahead to the future, it’s worth asking what being ‘civic’ means to us. 

For Joseph Chamberlain, the driving force behind the university, the idea of civic was all about Birmingham. He founded the university to help fuel the political, cultural and economic growth of this powerful new city at the turn of the last century.

From the beginning ‘civic’ was a commercial mission but also a social one. The university should train people with the skills required for Birmingham’s industries and provide the scientific research that would give them a competitive advantage. At the same time a focus on medicine and education, both research and training, benefited the local community in particular; and academic partnerships with groups like ‘The Birmingham Settlement’ would seek to address the challenges of poverty in the city. Later, the university expanded its civic mission into Birmingham’s cultural life, bringing musical performance and the visual arts into play with the founding of the Barber Institute.

Birmingham was set up to challenge the older universities. Being civic was about offering a practical and accessible alternative to the likes of Oxford and Cambridge. But while we were never uptight about the idea of being useful or delivering an outcome, it’s clear from our comprehensive approach to both teaching and academic enquiry that our conception of ‘civic’ was built on a fundamental belief in the intrinsic value of creating and sharing knowledge.

The final lesson we can learn from looking at our past is that, although ‘civic’ was definitely all about Birmingham, that didn’t mean it was parochial in its scope or limited to the local. Birmingham in 1900 was a world city, plugged into the global economy and connected culturally to every continent. To be connected to Birmingham was to be connected to the world and the university was built to help drive those connections.

So, our founding civic mission was a rich mix of the economic and social, the local, national and international. It had a Humboldtian practicality and a Victorian drive to make and build. But it also had a spirit of public and cultural engagement at its heart right from the beginning.

125 years on, the world has changed and the university has transformed with it, but arguably that mix of impact and engagement, activation and connection, is still fundamental to what makes us who we are. And, we believe, vital to what the future holds.