The Academy and Hospitality

The concept of hospitality undergirds the very reason for the academy.

A key virtue for the academy is hospitality -- the extension of self in order to welcome the other by sharing and receiving intellectual resources and insights. This intellectual and moral virtue is essential to the work and success of the academy. [1] Admittedly, my view is not a common one. Hospitality is often taken to mean a bland congeniality. As theologian Henri Nouwen notes, for many if not most of us, hospitality suggests "tea parties, bland conversations, and a general atmosphere of coziness." [2]

Within the academy, hospitable individuals are often scolded for being "soft" on standards and inclined toward compromise rather than standing forthrightly for intellectual rigor and excellence. Organizationally, being hospitable does not fare any better. It is usually associated with hotel/restaurant management programs rather than with goals for every program, school, or institution. Instead of modeling hospitality, disciplines and departments may contain deep ideological and personal divisions. Departments and schools often struggle with each other over resources or prestige, and many institutions seem themselves to be locked in competition for students and standing. In fact, in academe the concept has lost much of its original power. But as Nouwen observes of its broader importance, "if there is any concept worth restoring to its original depth and evocative potential, it is the concept of hospitality." [3]

Intellectual Hospitality and the Academy

Throughout learning, being intellectually hospitable means being open to the different voices and idioms of others as potential agents for mutual enhancement, not just oppositional conflict. Consider Michael Oakeshott's metaphor of "conversation" for the work of the academy. In the sharing and receiving of hospitality "different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to each other" [4] -- though they can be enriched and changed. Conversations include, but are more than, disputes and quarrels, assertions and denials. Arguments are used constructively to clarify issues, not to vanquish opponents. The key point is respectful engagement with the other--what Oakeshott calls "acknowledgment and accommodation," not indifference or conquest. Respectful engagement requires willingness to suspend initial scepticism about the other as well as to put one's own cards on the table -- to indicate one's own position a nd its support, however vulnerable that makes one. [5]

An indispensable characteristic of healthy learning communities, intellectual hospitality involves welcoming others through openness in both sharing and receiving claims to knowledge and insight. The sharing is marked by considerateness toward others and recognition that others' distinctive individualities and overall experience are inherently relevant to their learning. The receiving is marked by awareness that however initially strange, the perspective of the other could easily supplement and perhaps correct one's own work or even transform one's self-understanding. Hospitable educators know that adverse evidence may have been overlooked, that the potential for self-deception always accompanies the desire to support one's position, and that different and even foreign perspectives can provide breakthroughs in understanding,

We can distinguish between two levels of hospitable conversation. [6] The initial and primary level is that of offering to share and to receive -- disclosing information and dimensions of one's own perspective on knowledge as well as attending respectfully to similar initiatives by the other. This initial level of hospitality, of mutual conversational exchange, requires that each hold in abeyance perhaps strong views of the subject under review. The objective is not to convert the other but to provide insight into the positions held. Only when this occurs sufficiently is it appropriate and fruitful to move into the second level, the provision of feedback on the positions exchanged--the sharing of analysis and criticism, offered in the effort to move toward a testing and deepening of the insights under review as well as those that may well emerge through this process.

Intellectual hospitality includes but goes beyond being courteous and civil. Acts of courtesy and civility can be used to limit or even avoid interaction with others on difficult or controversial subjects -- thus continuing rather than correcting inhospitable customs and traditions. Familiar examples include the "civil" refusal to review curricula or even traditional course assignments, for fear of upsetting comfortable arrangements and reigniting turf wars. Some educators enter into tacit agreements to isolate and ignore rather than confront colleagues who repeatedly shirk service obligations, neglect or abuse students, or abandon the ongoing scholarship that energizes and informs teaching. Civil truces among warring parties may be good, but they can involve an expensive denial of the greater good that comes only with efforts to address the common welfare. In any case, being intellectually hospitable is certainly not simply "being nice."