Focusing on the value of Friendship for Education.

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 the 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 of others’ work, in person or in print, often appear more combative than constructive. The point seems to be to win mental warfare and so gain a superior reputation. Quantity has overshadowed quality, and higher education misses the mark by not engaging and encouraging the whole student and the whole educator as they strive to become their best self It is time to rethink teachers’ roles and their relationships with students and colleagues. In what follows, I suggest embracing an educational framework grounded in a philosophy of friendship to nurture and sustain a more caring, mutually supportive intellectual community. The tension I just outlined revolves around different ways of understanding education’s role. From a monetary perspective, education is about job preparation and how to capture a portion of the market. But from a different angle, education concerns the development of cultures of intellectual inquiry focused on personal development, integrity, and utilizing diverse fields of knowledge for human fulfillment. In today’s context, while many students find education worth the investment, just as many find college classrooms uninteresting. Campuses have high levels of student depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol abuse, sexual assaults, and racism. For professors, the problems are just as real, but of a different kind. Studies have found that professors are dissatisfied with their work and lack enthusiasm, and a scarcity of job security for non-tenured staff has led to unhappiness, a lack of motivation, and negative attitudes in the classroom.

 Shrinking departments, more responsibilities, and less support, have created a downhearted group of educational laborers. Academia, then, needs an alternative approach that can cultivate better relationships, improve environments for both learning and teaching, and develop more advantageous conditions for personal and social growth. A theory of education grounded in friendship is one response, so the rest of this article will focus on the relevance of four dimensions of fiendship for higher education, and how they could shift communities of learners away from a monetary economy toward a focus on the talents and potential of individuals