As humanity faces a worsening polycrisis, the need for systemic change in society is becoming more widely recognized. This time of increasing disruptions of all kinds comes with new opportunities for imagining societal transformation. With the accelerating climate crisis and growing economic precarity, higher education institutions are underleveraged infrastructure with untapped potential to facilitate, and to contribute to, social, economic, and spatial change for a more equitable and stable future. This paper argues that restructuring universities, including their spatial distribution and their public financing, is an essential part of systemic societal transformation. Instead of reinforcing universities as entrepreneurial, financialized organizations that concentrate wealth and power in well-off regions and urban centers, higher education could be restructured to prioritize equity, justice and the public good. A radical spatial and financial redistribution of higher education institutions would entail expanding and reconceptualizing universities’ engagement with marginalized and vulnerable communities and regions. A more equitably dispersed spatial distribution is required for universities to support communities and become a resource for transformative regional economic redistribution. Building on a review of diverse literatures on the purpose and structure of higher education, we argue that a restructuring of the spatial distribution of universities is necessary so that all communities have access to resources within regional campuses. Just as many countries have invested in a regionally distributed system of public libraries to be a resource for communities, new investments in the spatial distribution of higher education institutions could provide regionally-specific resources for communities and households in climate vulnerable regions. This spatial redistribution and restructuring would allow universities to respond to the polycrisis by supporting, catalyzing, and facilitating the co-design and co-creation of regionally appropriate transformations.