IN his first lecture in Wales as Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams spoke up for "awkward people that ask questions about the running of society" created by universities.
The Archbishop was attempting to define citizenship in a time of social change when addressing staff and students from the University of Glamorgan on Thursday.
He told 200 guests at the Glamorgan Business Centre, in Treforest: "We are used to having decisions made for us, the long-term effect of which has been to squeeze, muffle and shrink our self-confidence as a nation.
"Part of the function of a good university is to create awkward people who will ask questions about the way in which our society is run.
"While political ideals may come and go, there is something about the argumentative, difficult, imaginative person that a citizen is, which would represent a possibly fatal loss to our whole sense of what the human is."
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