ABSTRACTBringing philosophical work on friendship to bear on the growing body of critique about the state of the neoliberal academy, this paper defends academic friendship. Initially a vignette illustrates the key features of academic friendship and the multiple demands on academics to account for themselves in the neoliberal university. We locate academic friendship in the context of that neoliberal university before discussing managerialist threats to this relationship. We indicate how the performativity-driven working environment contrasts radically and unfavourably with some defining (...) features of friendship. Academic friendship, we argue, can entail generative intellectual and moral activity and growth though trusting and honest reflection on research and scholarship, and teaching and learning. Contending that it may offer an antidote to aspects of the neoliberal academy, in our concluding section academic friendship is highlighted as both a defence and a means of resistance against the worst excesses of the university in dark times. (shrink)

Derridean hospitality is seen to undergird ethical teacher–student interactions. However, hospitality is marked by three aporias that signal incommensurable and irreducible ways of being and responding that need to be held together in tension without eventual synthesis. Due to the sociopolitical materiality of race and the phenomenological difference that constitutes racialized bodies, educators of color in interaction with white students are called to live the aporetic tensions that characterize hospitality in distinctive ways that are not currently emphasized in the discourse (...) on the educator’s responsibility as it is informed by an ethic of hospitality. The asymmetrical nature of hospitality is reconfigured through the terms of eros and hospitality’s link to education aimed at social justice is posited to be stronger than is currently suggested in the educational theory literature. (shrink)