With the change of political regime, the possible free movement within the European Union, the advancing globalization, and the fast progress of information technologies, Czech universities, as well as universities of other post-communist states, appeared in a situation when they need to be internationally competitive. It is not sufficient any more to concentrate only on traditional values of the academia. It means to accept a managerial way of thinking, implement procedures of strategic management, and build the organizational culture that will support accomplishment of strategic objectives. The paper presents the results of a qualitative study whose aims were to compare the core values of Czech and British universities and to find out to what extent the universities have formulated the core values and what indicates their contents – how universities (in different conditions of historical development) perceive and declare their roles and what they consider important. The data were gained from web sites and by an analysis of the available strategic documents of the examined universities; the core values were categorized and compared. The found differences are interpreted in the context of strategic management and the stakeholder theory.