Higher Education and the Enduring Value of Hospitality: Reflections for the 21st Century

Abstract

AbstractThe 21st century is a perilous time for international collaboration among university actors. Mobility and international exchange have come to a total standstill as the world shelters in place, trying to slow down the course of a pandemic. However, the crisis of hospitality in higher education has been long in the making. Within universities, internationalization has been driven by profits and revenues for decades, while discussions of core values have been cast aside as utopian or idealistic. There are thousands of displaced, imprisoned and exiled academics, and there are millions of university-aged refugees in the world, with only a tiny fraction of them entering universities. Beyond university walls, scepticism toward the other has been brewing, popularizing xenophobic nationalism and construing mobility as a threat that must be curtailed or regulated to new extremes. As some governments have turned to authoritarianism, universities have become targets, and government actions have resulted in significant numbers of displaced and unemployed academics, many of whom look beyond national borders to find spaces where the pursuit of their ideas is less threatening and where they can exercise their intellectual calling. Responding to these needs requires hospitality, which is not unprecedented, but that has become a lower priority among many others such as the constant pressure to move up the rankings or league tables.