The Point: Unreasonable Hospitality, Reasonable Conditions

3/26/2026

This week’s Point is written by Gonzalo Bacigalupe, Professor of Counseling Psychology.  As always, The Point represents the views of the author and is not the official position of the FSU.

This year marks my thirtieth year as a faculty member at the university. Over that time, I have seen many ideas travel into academic life from other sectors. Some illuminate our work. Others arrive wrapped in appealing language but fit less comfortably once they encounter the realities of teaching, advising, and shared governance.

Over the past two decades, many of these imported ideas have been tied to a broader shift in how universities are encouraged to understand their relationship to students. Increasingly, the language of higher education has borrowed from the vocabulary of markets—students as customers, education as a service, institutions competing through “experience” and “satisfaction.” It is within that broader shift that ideas like “hospitality” and “customer experience” begin to feel natural, even inevitable.

Recently, during a discussion in my college about Will Guidara’s book Unreasonable Hospitality, I found myself thinking about how ideas developed in the restaurant industry are increasingly traveling into university life.

Guidara draws a useful distinction between service and hospitality. Service, he suggests, is technical: the task is completed correctly. Hospitality adds what he calls “color.” It is the dimension of experience in which the person receiving the service feels recognized, respected, and genuinely considered. It is an appealing idea. Few of us would argue that the work of a university should be reduced to efficient transactions. Students, colleagues, and staff benefit when interactions feel human rather than mechanical.

Yet there is another part of Guidara’s story that deserves equal attention. The transformation of Eleven Madison Park into one of the most celebrated restaurants in the world did not come from asking employees simply to “try harder.” It came from redesigning systems. Staffing levels, training, authority, and organizational culture were deliberately structured to support the kind of care the restaurant wanted to deliver. In other words, excellence was not only inspirational — it was infrastructural. 

That point becomes especially relevant when ideas like “unreasonable hospitality” migrate into academic settings like our own. Because the question quickly becomes not only what we aspire to provide, but what conditions make that aspiration possible. During our discussion, I found myself returning to a concept that rarely appears in inspirational leadership narratives but is central to institutional life: margin.

By margin I mean the institutional slack that allows people time, flexibility, and emotional capacity beyond mere survival of their workload. Margin is what allows a faculty member to spend an extra fifteen minutes helping a struggling student without feeling that something else is about to collapse. It is what allows an advisor to listen carefully rather than rush through a queue. It is what allows care to be genuine rather than performative. Without margin, the aspiration to provide extraordinary care risks becoming something else entirely: an additional expectation layered onto already stretched work.

There is also a broader question about how ideas travel. Corporate and service-sector language can be seductive when it enters academic conversations. Concepts like “customer experience,” “hospitality,” or “exceeding expectations” promise simple solutions to complex institutional problems. But the analogy has limits. Students are not clients in a restaurant, and a university is not a service counter. Students are protagonists in their own intellectual development, not consumers whose satisfaction defines the success of the encounter. The work of teaching and advising requires collaboration, challenge, and sometimes friction. Translating that relationship too easily into a service model risks misunderstanding what education is meant to accomplish.

This also raises another question that universities cannot afford to ignore. Even when care is offered generously, it is not always distributed evenly. Research across higher education has long shown that relational and emotional labor—mentoring students, supporting struggling colleagues, serving on diversity committees, and responding to institutional crises—tends to fall disproportionately on women faculty and on faculty and staff of color. Amado Padilla described this dynamic decades ago as “cultural taxation,” the additional service burden placed on faculty of color because of institutional diversity needs. These forms of labor are essential to the functioning of a university community. Yet they are often undervalued in evaluation systems and unevenly shared across departments.

In this context, calls for greater attentiveness, responsiveness, and care must be accompanied by a difficult but necessary question: who is already doing this work, and who is not?

My own experiences in institutions where I have felt most “seen” did not involve dramatic gestures. They involved something quieter: systems that worked. Communication was clear. Expectations were transparent. The person helping me did not appear depleted. There was margin in the system.

Universities today face a stark contradiction and ours is not an exception. At the same time that faculty and staff are being asked to provide more care, more responsiveness, and more emotional presence, we confront a shrinking public investment, growing legislative scrutiny of curriculum and academic freedom, and increasing pressure to treat education primarily through the language of markets and customers.

In that environment, asking for ever greater “hospitality” without addressing workload, staffing, and institutional design risks placing the burden of institutional aspiration on individual goodwill. When that happens, the outcomes are familiar: exhaustion, quiet disengagement, or colleagues deciding that the only sustainable strategy is simply to do less.

If universities truly want cultures of extraordinary care, the question cannot simply be what individuals should do differently. It must also be what the institution is willing to invest, redistribute, or redesign to make that aspiration viable.

Because hospitality — in a university as in a restaurant — cannot be sustained by goodwill alone. It requires reasonable conditions. And above all, it requires margin.

The committee for this year’s The Point currently includes Jessica Holden, Healey Library; Nick Juravich, History; Jeff Melnick, American Studies; and Steve Striffler, Labor Studies. If you want to write an edition of The Point, or if you just have an idea, please write us at fsu@umb.edu