THE PROFESSOR IS YOUR FRIEND. On Hospitality, Knowledge, and the Refusal of Enmity in Academia
THE PROFESSOR IS YOUR FRIEND. On Hospitality, Knowledge, and the Refusal of Enmity in Academia

Summary/Abstract: This essay responds to contemporary political rhetoric proposed by J.D. Vance, who follows Richard Nixon in recasting universities as hostile institutions and intellectuals as enemies of democratic life in his keynote speech delivered before the audiences of the Second National Conservatism Conference in November 2021. Rather than defending higher education as an idealized or flawless system, the essay proposes a different ethical framework: hospitality understood as an institutional, epistemic, and civic practice. Drawing on philosophical traditions of hospitality and friendship—from Kant’s cosmopolitan right and Lévinas’s ethics of responsibility to Derrida’s reflections on conditional and unconditional welcome, as well as dialogical accounts of relational authority—the text reframes the university as a space of encounter rather than control. Situated within hemispheric and transoceanic American Studies, the essay emphasizes that American knowledge has never been self-contained, but has emerged through circulation, translation, and conflict across borders. Universities are approached as fragile architectures of exposure: institutions that do not manufacture consensus or loyalty, but sustain the conditions under which disagreement can occur without collapsing into enmity. Addressing debates over expertise, education, history, labor, environment, and digital knowledge, the text resists the conversion of critique into “siege rhetoric.” By proposing the figure of the professor as friend and the university as host, this essay invites readers to reconsider intellectual life as a shared undertaking grounded in responsibility, listening, and ethical risk. Hospitality, it argues, is not sentiment but discipline—and a necessary condition for democratic and transnational inquiry in the twenty-first century.

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