Criticality is open to contrasting meanings but generally involves the exercise of careful, deliberate and well-informed judgement. This can be contrasted to its more pejorative everyday meaning of finding fault, being ‘judgmental’, ‘nit-picking’. Being critical is valued in academia as it involves having the confidence to make informed judgements. It is about finding one’s own voice, values and building one’s own standpoint in the face of numerous other voices. Exercising criticality involves careful evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of other people’s ideas and being fair without showing excessive humility or arrogance.

Within the western university it is both accepted and expected that academic enquiry will involve questioning the work and ideas of others, and students are often to be critical or at least to be ‘more critical’ by tutors. Criticality may be less prized in other cultures and the importance given to it may wax and wane across time (Johnston et al, 2011). This has meant that some researchers continue to be in awe of certain authors or ‘authorities’ and a tradition of deference continues in some university departments.

In contrast, being critical can become a dogmatic stance for some researchers who seem instinctively ‘contrarian’ for the sake of it. Assumptions about the exercise of criticality need to be continually revisited. Having established the need for criticality, what is there to be critical about? One can certainly be critical of the literature on a topic and take a more ‘profane’ view as to what has gone on before. The critical researcher may uncover what has been previously ignored and draw attention to any systematic ‘bias’ in reporting of research. This may lead to a critical stance in respect to the discipline in general and, perhaps less comfortable, how disciplinary knowledge is represented in an institution.

How far, for example, can the ‘disinterested pursuit of truth’ exist once academia becomes ‘massified’ (Barnett 1990) and subject to external control and external funding? In other words academia values criticality but does it really exercise criticality? However, the exercise of criticality should also involve a kind of reflexivity as to one’s own thinking, beliefs, faith and knowledge, not just other people’s. This requires a sensitivity to, and awareness of, our own biases, prejudices and pre-conceptions. Criticality is both a skill and a disposition.

Criticality often goes hand in hand with ideas of critical thinking (Hanscomb, 2016). Critical thinking again is multi-dimensional as a concept. For some critical thinking involves dispositions, for example willingness to form one’s own view, which might be identified, even measured. For others it is rather an epistemological stance involving a pragmatic scepticism about knowledge. For yet others again it rest on strong cognitive / subject knowledge foundations so that there is little point in thinking critically without the intellectual tools to do so.

Barnett, R. (1990) The idea of Higher Education, Buckingham: Open Univeristy Press.

Hanscomb, S. (2016) Critical Thinking: The Basics, London, Routledge.

Johnston et al. Devloping student criticality in Higher Edcuation London: Contunuum.