Earlier studies on stakeholder management in European universities focused on proactive strategies, that is, substantive organizational practices to establish and maintain mutually beneficial exchanges between universities and their stakeholders. We argue that the literature on stakeholder management has to be extended by theorizing defensive strategies (i.e. verbal or symbolic accounts in response to stakeholder criticism). Drawing on the institutional logics perspective, we investigate how and why a highly reputed, research-intensive European university deploys defensive strategies in the mass media. Our single-case study demonstrates that defensive strategies vary depending on the type of stakeholder criticism. Our study indicates that the relations between universities and their critical stakeholders can be consensual, but only if stakeholders criticize organizational values belonging to the institutional logic(s) from which universities operate.