In "Universities without Walls: Engaging Our World," Janice Reid provided an excellent survey of the traditions and perspectives that underpin university engagement, and pointed to some of the challenges that remain in genuinely "mainstreaming" this work. In this commentary, Paul Manners offers a further challenge: that those working to progress the engagement cause in higher education risk arguing and reasoning themselves into an "engagement bubble." He contends that "Universities without Walls: Engaging Our World" remains at a rather general level, reflecting the fact that as a community of scholars and practitioners committed to this work, there is more work to be done collectively. Reid presents the "engagement work" but says too little about the engine, or about what race we are actually competing in! To take seriously the significant changes sweeping through higher education, we must reframe the arguments about engagement to address this new context for our work, and make sure we are in the right race, not running on a parallel track. The author states "this can addressed through the lenses of theory and practice" which are further described here. [For "Universities without Walls: Engaging Our World," see EJ1132858.]