https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.23345
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.
Download files
Citation rules
Cited by / Share
Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The Copyright Holder of the submitted text is the Author. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the RIAS websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Any commercial use requires separate written agreement with the Author and a proper credit line indicating the source of the original publication in RIAS.
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY 4.0 license.
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution - By the same conditions 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
Submitting a text to RIAS, the Author automatically declares that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, he or she agrees to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, in connection with the submission.
Vol. 19 No. 1 (2026)
Published: 2026-06-30
10.31261/RIAS
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
English