Citizenship and the thinking university : toward the citizen scholar

The present chapter considers what constitutes a thinking university of the future. We argue that universities as centres of thought need to consider the relationship between knowledge and citizenship. How knowledge is produced and transmitted matters as this is truly what is transformational to both the students encountered and the communities engaged. But the role of the contemporary university is not only to produce and transmit knowledge but also to foster individual and community empowerment. In this sense a thinking university also promotes active citizenship. Combining the philosophical postulation of Martin Heidegger’s (Heidegger M (1927) Being and time, (Trans: Macquarrie J and Robinson E 1967), Harper & Row, New York) ‘threshold’ and Paolo Friere’s (1972) liberation pedagogy, our position is that universities can create an environment where students can be empowered through knowledge and the development of a set of tools to employ that knowledge. To do this, we propose that a thinking university actively embodies and promotes the idea of the citizen scholar (Arvanitakis J (2014) Massification and the large lecture theatre: from panic to excitement. High Educ 67:735–745).