International Day of Friendship

Western philosophers have enthusiastically praised friendship. Afew intellectuals have raised doubts about it, such as Thomas Hobbes and Soren Kierkegaard, but friendship has inspired many others, including Aristotle, Francis Bacon, C.S. Lewis, and Mary E. Hunt, who have esteemed its benefits, especially the reciprocal commitment to nurture each friend’s ‘best self. Similar admiration is somewhat lacking today, however, and the marginalization of t he importance of good relationships within higher education complements this trend. With current attempts to make colleges more businesslike, reductive assessments, cost benefit analyses and data have taken center stage. Students are statistics expressed in the language of graduation rates and post graduation employment rates, which become selling points to attract future students. This environment shapes relationships between the stafftoo; in a competitive academic marketplace, faculty need data to justify their existence, and criticisms o...

  True friends don’t tell each other what to do and what not to do, who they can talk to and who their other friends can be.

 The concept of friendship is historical; philosophers in different cultures and epochs have emphasized certain aspects of friendship that others have not. In ancient Greece and Rome, the civic dimension of friendship was prominent as some argued that it was part of the social glue that held societies together. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, friendship’s centrality for a good society began to be questioned - such as when Thomas Hobbes challenged the possible socially destabilizing nature of preferential love. Identifying the convergences and divergences in philosophers’ views of friendship is important for understanding its nuances. I wish to look at four philosophical approaches, from Aristotle, Bacon, Lewis, and Hunt. Their writings reveal friendship’s significance and how friends help one another when they are weak or struggling . The need to take friendship seriously as a model for all relationships, based on how friends courageously pursue a common tru...

Taking friendship seriously in the educational environment means moving beyond contemporary ideas of education focused on employment, hyper-rationalism, and rote learning. Instead, friendship redirects attention to the relational dimension of education, placing relationships at the center of the learning environment . Whether between students, between teachers, or between students and teachers, a friendship-based educational model emphasizes how these relationships can be more open, mutually supportive, and focused on nurturing the best in each person. It moves the focus away from quantification and reductive assessments, a monetary economy, and unsupportive power dynamics, toward a focus on everybody’s gifts and processes aimed at mutual betterment and greater relational equality. A philosophy promoting friendship in higher education, then, could help students and educators to stay focused on people helping one another to grow, the relevance of the emotional life for education, the ...