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Welcoming the Unknown
Hospitality for Academics

by Elizabeth M. Topp

There they sit in their tent on the plains of Mamre, old Abraham and Sarah, trying to escape the heat of the day. Unexpectedly, three strangers arrive. Abraham offers them food and drink, and Sarah is sent bustling to prepare it. Perhaps she grumbles a little at being disturbed from her rest. Perhaps Abraham prods her, calling her "old woman." During their visit, the strangers tell Abraham that Sarah will bear him a son, and she erupts in incredulous laughter. A year later, though, they both delight in their son Isaac and in the fulfillment of God's promise. A visit from strangers, a simple act of hospitality.

It's August in Kansas, the beginning of another semester. It is disgustingly hot. I sit in a classroom in Malott Hall, whose cranky old air conditioning is losing its battle with the heat. I review my lecture notes and polish my favorite first-day-of-class jokes. In a few minutes, a hundred or so first-year pharmacy students will file in to begin a course in Pharmacy Calculations. Though the circumstances differ, like Abraham and Sarah I'll be meeting strangers on a hot day when I'd rather be resting. Do I owe them hospitality? If so, what forms might it take?

In this essay I want to discuss a particular kind of hospitality: that offered by Christian faculty to students of all levels at a secular university. Such hospitality, in my experience, takes three forms: social hospitality, pedagogical hospitality, and intellectual hospitality. I hope to encourage other Christian faculty to take this simple virtue seriously, to think clearly about it, and to watch for opportunities for it in their daily interactions with students. Let me add that I have been deeply influenced by the work of Parker Palmer, who has written at length on the various forms of hospitality and their importance in good teaching. I recommend his books To Know as We Are Known and The Courage to Teach for further reading.

Though "social hospitality" might sound redundant, I mean specifically the sorts of activities that we normally associate with the word "hospitality." Social hospitality allows students and faculty to interact outside the normal academic environment. Dinners or parties in one's home, intramural teams that include both faculty and students, and church or parachurch activities such as retreats all can serve as occasions of social hospitality. When a faculty member extends social hospitality to a student, their shared humanity is emphasized. The student is recognized as a person rather than a subordinate and, in turn, experiences the professor as a human being with a life outside the classroom, library, and laboratory. When the faculty member is a Christian, a central part of life is our Christian faith, a faith that may not be readily displayed in the classroom. For example, while I hope that my Pharmacy Calculations students experience my faith in how I treat them, my personal testimony does not often come up, to say the least, in a classroom lecture on the calculation of methotrexate doses using body surface area. A student who visits my home, however, will recognize immediately that our bookshelves are filled with Christian books — Bibles, commentaries, fiction — a mute testimony to the things that we read and that we value.

This social hospitality has its limitations, however. Chief among these is the imbalance of power in faculty/student relationships. Abraham didn't give grades to the strangers who visited him, he didn't write them letters of recommendation for graduate school, and he didn't help them line up job interviews with major pharmaceutical companies. While we faculty may forget about this imbalance, our students do not. I've watched my normally boisterous graduate students reduced to a band of monosyllabic cave dwellers when huddled around my kitchen table. Maybe it's the horrible wallpaper, but I suspect it has something to do with their awareness of my role as their evaluator and the discomfort that can create in a social setting. ("If I use the wrong fork, will it affect my grade? If this lady with the Christian books finds out that I'm living with my boyfriend, will I pass my comps?") Needless to say, we must never give students the grounds for such fear. And the discomfort can be diluted with repeated social encounters, but it can't be (and perhaps shouldn't be) eliminated entirely. For me, one alternative is to show social hospitality to students whom I do not evaluate directly, who are not enrolled in my classes or conducting dissertation research under my direction.

As faculty members, we have opportunities to extend hospitality that reaches beyond the social level. For instance, what I call "pedagogical hospitality" welcomes the student into the concepts, methods, and customs of the discipline that the faculty member calls "home." Like social hospitality, pedagogical hospitality welcomes the stranger, the student. Here, though, the space into which the stranger enters is not physical, but rather is the body of learning and forum of interchange that make up a discipline. In the classroom, pedagogical hospitality is offered when a student's question is treated with respect even when it is misguided, when information is presented in more than one way, or when students participate in discussions that value their perspectives. Some of the students in my Pharmacy Calculations class are profoundly math-phobic. Dealing with these fears and helping the student replace them with both competence and confidence is an exercise in pedagogical hospitality.

Outside the classroom, pedagogical hospitality makes time for students' concerns about the discipline and its intersection with their lives. Welcoming the student to the discipline involves more than explaining content clearly; it must include the recognition of the student as a whole person with all the baggage and weirdness that entails. I can effectively measure my stress level by watching the time it takes me to respond to a student at my office door asking, "Do you have a minute?" Sometimes the student has a scientific question, sometimes it's a personal problem. Occasionally, it's a personal problem that's wrapped in a scientific one, as if to improve its palatability. Whatever the issue, I try to remind myself that Jesus came deal with people's physical, emotional, and spiritual pain. Sometimes that lowers my response time to the question, "Do you have a minute?" or even makes the answer "yes" when it might more easily have been "no."

Like social hospitality, pedagogical hospitality is complicated by the imbalance of power in faculty/student relationships. In the classroom, the faculty member serves not only as a kind of academic host, but also as a judge of student performance. The latter role often conflicts with the former. The academic host seeks to make the student feel welcome, while the judge must evaluate the student's performance against the standards of the discipline. Though it is the performance and not the students themselves that are judged, we do take these evaluations personally. Try as I might, I cannot make a student who receives an "F" in Pharmacy Calculations feel welcomed into the discipline. I know of no solution to this conflict other than to make the goals for student learning and the methods of evaluation as clear and objective as possible, and to continue to affirm the personal worth of all students regardless of their performance. Objective evaluation becomes more difficult as the student advances to the graduate level, where personal attributes such as drive, persistence, and optimism influence progress and can only be evaluated subjectively. Perhaps the difficulty of maintaining hospitality in these circumstances only highlights our need for it.

A third type of hospitality we might call "intellectual hospitality." Intellectual hospitality makes room available for the novel or even alien idea within our framework of thought. As with social hospitality, the stranger is welcomed into a space in which he was not previously known. Here, however, both the stranger and the space he enters exist only in the realm of the intellect. I like the New Testament Greek word philoxenia in this context. Usually translated into English as "hospitality," the word might well be paraphrased as "love of that which is not known." Those of us engaged in research are well acquainted with this kind of love, the excitement of discovering something entirely new. Similarly, students who love to learn gladly welcome ideas that are new to them, though known to others. Entertaining a new idea is one of the great delights of the academic life. If we hold that "all truth is God's truth," intellectual hospitality may provide us with insights into God's character as well as the world he has made.

Intellectual hospitality is tied to social and pedagogical hospitality, since, as Palmer notes, it is often strange people who act as bearers of strange ideas. The strangers who visited Abraham and Sarah brought with them an even stranger idea: Sarah would give birth to a son in her old age. Her laughter suggests that she did not initially extend intellectual hospitality to this odd idea. As events unfolded, however, the "idea" moved in to stay. Sarah's behavior also raises the important distinction between intellectual hospitality and intellectual adoption. In intellectual hospitality, new ideas are welcomed for genuine consideration; in intellectual adoption, new ideas are woven permanently into an individual's fabric of thought.

Like social and pedagogical hospitality, intellectual hospitality has its pitfalls. One of these is syncretism, the attempted combination of different and even opposing ideas. This can happen in our academic disciplines when we attempt to merge contradictory theories. More importantly for Christian faculty, however, syncretism can occur when ideas we entertain in our academic lives contradict the tenets of our faith. For example, many conservative Christians feel that scientists like me who accept both the theory of evolution and the creation story of Genesis are guilty of a kind of syncretism. Avoiding syncretism requires both intellectual and spiritual discernment. Certainly, ideas that we consider for intellectual adoption should receive our careful evaluation. In some cases, similar care should be exercised even in extending intellectual hospitality. Murderers make dangerous dinner guests; occasionally murderous ideas should also be turned away at the door.

A related pitfall is dilettantism, in which many widely varying ideas are entertained to excess. Like a house full of guests who never go home and whose presence prevents both work and rest alike, dilettantism prevents the focus needed for real creativity. The fact that I am writing this essay, rather than one of several research manuscripts that await my attention, alerts me to my own tendencies in this direction. Here too, discernment is required to prevent the virtue of intellectual hospitality from becoming over-indulgent.

Christian faculty at secular universities have many opportunities for social, pedagogical, and intellectual hospitality. As Christians, we have been graced with the ultimate form of hospitality: God has invited us into his household, made us welcome, and asked us to stay. We can mirror this hospitality in small ways in our day-to-day interactions with our students, and with fellow faculty and staff. Perhaps in doing so, like Abraham and Sarah, we too may entertain angels unawares and help to usher in the good news with a simple act of hospitality. 

Elizabeth M. Topp is a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Kansas.

This essay is part of the "Pursuing Virtues" series at FollowingChrist.org.