For one and all: Being an academic citizen on an interconnected Earth

Abstract

The idea of citizen implies a polis, a collectivity of persons contributing their voices and actions to the good running of the community. In uttering and acting as citizens, both the public realm and a public is formed. The university as an institution and its educational processes are doubly implicated here. First, issues arise as to the extent to which the university is itself a kind of public, modelling the public realm, and founded on critical dialogue among equals. Second, issues arise as to the extent to which the university might be able and willing to advance this public realm. These issues generate two questions: what does academic citizenship mean? And, what if potential members of the public are voiceless? I answer these two questions together. Being an academic citizen is a matter of an ever-widening sphere in which this citizenship is located. This entails successively reaching out from one’s discipline and one’s students, to the world, and to the Earth. The pool in which academic citizenship is enacted is all the time widening, to those who lie beyond the current boundaries of the university, and all the inhabitants of Nature. Ultimately, to be an academic citizen is to be for one and all across this whole Earth.