Special Forum Critical Thinking: The Galway Symposium on the Future of Universities Kelly Coate (Special Forum Editor) National University of Ireland, Galway Kelly Coate is a lecturer in the Centre for Learning and Teaching in the National University of Ireland, Galway. The papers in this Special Forum of AHHE originated as keynote presentations at a Symposium held in June 2008. The event was organized by the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) at the National University of Ireland, Galway 1 . The idea for the Symposium was that we would make a break with tradition from the previous, and successful, 5 years of annual CELT conferences which focused on issues to do with learning and teaching in higher education. Rather, the Galway Symposium was intended to encourage debate not just about pedagogic issues, but about the very nature of higher education itself. The aim was to be provocative and to stimulate discussions around the purposes of universities in the 21 st century. We called the event ‘Critical Thinking: The Galway Symposium on the Future of Universities’. Critical thinking, of course, has a double meaning. It alludes not only to the type of critical thinking encouraged within universities but also about universities. Both types of critical thinking could be considered to be core values within higher education. Alison Phipps, in her piece in this issue, says simply but powerfully that in universities, critical thinking ‘is what we do’. And indeed, we had many wide‐ranging discussions over the course of the two days which raised some fundamentally critical questions about universities in contemporary society. In developing the Symposium we were motivated in part by the literature on the demise of ‐ if not the university itself – certain characteristics of traditional universities. The changes that have been felt here in the Irish system recently (and for longer in the UK) 1 I would like to thank all of my colleagues in CELT for their help in organizing the event (especially Grainne McGrath, Bernadette Henchy, Fiona Concannon and Sharon Flynn). Special thanks must go to the Director of CELT, Dr Iain Mac Labhrainn, who provided the title and much of the inspiration for the event.