A review and reflection on the liberation of hospitality higher education

Abstract

Hospitality higher education started to depart from its vocational orientation in the latter half of the 20th century following a rapid growth of global tourism. By incorporating liberal studies into its curricula, the sector aimed at helping students develop not only “professionally” but also “personally”. This article reviews the liberation of hospitality higher education and argues that it is an incomplete process due to a disproportionate emphasis on “professional” development. To complete this process, it is necessary to look beyond the boundary of “knowledge”, “skills”, and “attitudes” and regard hospitality not only as an industry but also a human character. Hence, this article calls for a contemplation of the original meaning of hospitality among teachers and learners as part of the effort to truly liberate hospitality higher education.

Keywords:

• hospitality
• education
• liberal
• vocational

1. Introduction: has hospitality higher education been liberated?

A few decades ago, people might have laughed at the idea of pursuing a bachelor’s degree to run a hotel. Today, it has become a norm. Hospitality education, a sector that has always been heavily influenced by a practical and craft-based tradition, started to depart from its vocational orientation in the 70s-80s of the 20th century, following a rapid growth of global tourism (Sigala & Baum, 2003). Both industry professionals and academics endorsed that departure. While the industry complained that hospitality education had not kept up to its demand, producing graduates with technical skills but not enough interpersonal competence and leadership (Casado, 1992; Sousa et al., 2022; Xu et al., 2022), hospitality academics criticised traditional hospitality education as not achieving enough in improving the industry practices and employees’ conditions (Morrison & O’Gorman, 2008). Writers of both sides began to refer to hospitality as a “knowledge economy” (Sigala & Baum, 2003) in which hospitality professionals were compelled to acquire more knowledge about the changing market and the forces driving it (Formica, 1996). Eventually, they cooperated to liberate hospitality education, a process that finally gave birth to hospitality higher education (HHE) and its first hospitality bachelor’s degree developed by Ecole Hotelier de Lausanne in the 1980s (Chen et al., 2019; Formica, 1996).

Peters (1977, as cited in Thiessen, 1989) defines liberal education as “the development of the free human being”. Liberal education, according to Peters, involves more than transmitting facts and skills; hence a liberated mind has an well-rounded development that enables it to conceptualise a set of principles behind a fragmented collection of facts (Martin, 1986; Thiessen, 1989). HHE, in its process of liberation, has strived to incorporate action-oriented training and conceptual knowledge in its programmes, hoping to help learners to think outside of the existing practices and develop themselves not only professionally but also personally (Morrison & O’Gorman, 2008). The process that started in the latter half of the previous century continues, but whether it has achieved its goal—to foster the development of all-rounded, liberated persons—is subject to debate.

In this article, I argue that the liberation of HHE is an incomplete process and suggest an approach to finding the missing component. The first part of the article discusses the formation of the HHE objectives under the disproportionate influence of the hospitality industry and the commercialised educational landscape. The second part explores the meaning of hospitality as a part of human character rather than economic activities, how that meaning is often neglected in the industry and within the educational environment, and how the contemplation of that meaning can contribute to the cultivation of fully liberated hospitality professionals.

2. Three pillars of an incomplete liberation

At the entrance of my hospitality school stand three pillars, on which three words are inscribed in bold letters: “Knowledge”—“Skills”—“Attitude”. Those three words sum up the qualities students will possess after graduating. “Knowledge”, “skills”, and “attitudes” are commonly cited as the objectives of education in official policies and curricula (Stewart, 2020), making them, to some extent, incontestable. I have been passing by those pillars for many years, never questioning what could be missing there.

Behind the erection of those three pillars is the belief that the most significant role of education, and hospitality education, in particular, is to close the workforce gap by providing the industry with high-calibre professionals (Goh & King, 2020; Lashley, 2018; Marneros et al., 2020; Sousa et al., 2022). There is a good reason for it. Education has become a commodity following the introduction of corporate universities and for-profit educational institutions (Sigala & Baum, 2003), and like any other business, it exists to serve its customers. In the case of HHE, the two biggest customers are the industry and the students. After all, without the blooming of international tourism and the enormous demand for personnel it entails, hospitality education may have been stuck at its vocational level (Sigala & Baum, 2003). The industry demands a workforce possessing qualities it deems worthwhile, while the students demand highly flexible, more affordable programmes that promise to increase their employability and future income (Lashley, 2018; Reich et al., 2016). Institutions that fail to meet customers’ demands may not have the sufficient financial capacity to operate. Consequently, HHE has become highly industry-led, going where the hospitality leaders would like it to go.

What the industry wants to see in its workers is how they conduct themselves as professionals. It has much less interest in how they are personally. The indication of that bias is its obsession with skills and performance. The industry often portrays an ideal worker as someone who possesses a perfect combination of strong hard professional skills and soft people management skills (Marneros et al., 2020). From my experience working in the industry, both as a front-line worker and a trainer, I can illustrate that combination as below:

• Hard skills help you to tell the differences between Pinot Noir and Merlot. Soft skills enable you to sell the right bottle to the customers using the art of small talk.

• With hard skills, you can arrange the most efficient roster for their team, but without the understanding of organisational behaviours—the soft skills—you will find it hard to convince anyone to show up on their off day to cover their sick colleague’s shift.

• You need to know how to read and analyse reports. Those are hard skills. You also need to know how to express genuine care for customers, show leadership and affirm commitment to sustainability and business ethics. Those are soft skills.

• You need all the above to achieve the business objectives successfully.

My analysis of hospitality competence above may sound very pessimistic, describing hospitality professionals as machine-like rather than human beings. It is, though sarcastic to some extent, not wholly baseless. The industry requires its workers to be highly skilled and constantly reminds them that whether the skill sets they use belong to the technical domain or socio-emotional areas, the main concern is attaining economic progress (Abbas et al., 2020; Sigala & Baum, 2003). Hospitality workers are under constant pressure to perform and achieve. Everything at the workplace translates to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), from staff’s working ability to customer satisfaction (Weber, 2019).

Hospitality education shares with the industry the same obsession. A programme’s learning outcomes often focus on the skills students need to acquire by the time completing each module of their degree (Reich et al., 2016). The education sector is so obsessed with skills that it often portrays every achievement and activity of the mind as skills. Even critical thinking and creativity are listed as tangible skills (Abbas et al., 2020; Reich et al., 2016; Xu et al., 2022) which can be acquired and examined as a learning outcome (Zhang, 2021) instead of the expressions of human characters. Lecturers are predominantly viewed as industry mentors (Zhang, 2021) whose professional backgrounds and industry experience are valued more than their teaching ability (Lee et al., 2016). The debate over a desirable HHE curriculum often centres around which key competencies should be the focus (Sousa et al., 2022). Students who mostly perceive their HHE experience as highly vocational-oriented prefer a “how to do” agenda that prioritises hard skills (Gross & Manoharan, 2016; Lashley, 2018). On the other hand, industry specialists and HHE educators prioritise soft and transferable skills (Sousa et al., 2022; Xu et al., 2022). Regardless of the differences in priorities, the success of HHE programmes is mainly evaluated by the extent to which their graduates meet the workplace’s expectations (Reich et al., 2016).The industry-led mentality of the HHE sector aligns with the utilitarian view of education which sees educational activities as a means to achieve three ultimate extrinsic ends—developing a skilled workforce, increasing the nation’s competitiveness and improving living standards (Stewart, 2020). However, liberal education cannot be conceived through the only lens of utilitarianism. The ancient Greek philosophers consider liberal education as a means to encourage humans to seek the truth and live a virtuous life, and many later authors have echoed that idea in their works (Tribe, 2000). The 19th-century philosopher John Henry Newman emphasises the pursuit of education as a way to find the true nature of things, and to satisfy and expand the mind (Tribe, 2000). R.S. Peters argues in his famous “Criteria of Education” that education is more than the transmitting of facts and skills; hence a person who simply masters a skill or has a body of knowledge cannot be considered educated in all sense of its meaning (Beckett, 2011). Meanwhile, Greene (1982) acknowledges the significance of fundamental skills—the “knacks and know-how” (p. 326), but insists on conceiving them as an opening rather than a fixed end. Greene’s idea resonates with Corson’s (1985) in his exploration of the connection between education and training. He defines training as a subordinate of education, a part that an educated person experiences in their pursuit of a “worthwhile form of life” (p. 291). In short, the centre of liberal education is an intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, end. If HHE aims solely at developing students in the professional realm, it cannot be considered fully liberated.

3. In search of the missing pillar

If “knowledge”, “skills”, and “attitudes” are not enough to liberate HHE, what could be the missing piece? Answering this question may require revisiting the real meaning of hospitality. De Lima Camargo (2015) reminds us that hospitality is not just an observable fact but also a value, an advanced human behaviour that belongs with those of solidarity, selflessness, charity and love. He notices that one can be confused by the dual nature of the hospitality interactions, which may be “friendly and loving, marked by the genuine desire for human contact” and at the same time “mediated by a payment, by money” (p. 20). Is it possible to see hospitality as a virtue in a world that often commercialises human interactions? Telfer (2003, as cited in De Lima Camargo, 2015) believes that profit is not necessarily the primary motivation of a commercial host; people may choose to work in hospitality because they are genuinely hospitable. She considers hospitality as a virtue one is endowed with. Lugosi (2011) enriches this remark by highlighting that hospitable attitudes and the urge to entertain others make commercial hosts virtuous, not the service itself. Likewise, Fujishima (2021) emphasises the difference between “service”, whose etymology implies a “master-slave relationship”, and “hospitality”, in which equal humans cooperate with each other to find mutual understanding.

To complete the liberation of HHE requires a revival of the hospitality spirit. HHE educators must remind themselves and their students that hospitality is a virtue. They must remember that the development of all-rounded hospitality professionals starts with cultivating them as human beings. This task will involve reconsidering the perceptions it has held for too long. Firstly, being educated is not just about developing rationality. The hospitality world is so obsessed with performance and achievement that it often translates every concept into the language of effectiveness and efficiency, including the ones that connect directly to human emotions. Take human touch and personalisation as an example. The industry leaders discuss these two concepts so widely that they have become buzzwords. As hospitality corporations face the ever-increasing competition in a global market, they realise that customers always value the genuine touch of human interactions (Solnet et al., 2019). They immediately search for solutions to turn it into a competitive advantage. State-of-the-art technologies, from AI to big data, are brought into the game to help managers write “personalised” text messages and offer “personalised” prices (Solnet et al., 2019). But are those solutions of the mind answer to the demand of the soul? John Dewey repeatedly criticised the inclination in contemporary education to emphasise the development of the rational mind instead of the mind as a whole (Martin, 1986). Without feelings, emotion and sensitivity, the objective, rational and analytical person is incomplete (Martin, 1986).

Secondly, education should be not only effective but also good. Biesta (2015) highlighted the fact that contemporary education has ignored good education in favour of effective education. HHE providers are constantly seeking efficient ways to deliver courses, i.e. developing modules and units to be delivered across different cohorts, in defiance of the decreasing interaction between lecturers and students (Lugosi & Jameson, 2017). The sector is experiencing what philosophers describe as the loss of educational concepts, which happens when students start to conceive themselves as customers, teachers as professionals and universities as businesses (Laverty, 2014). As a result, educators have difficulties engaging students in meaningful conversations, such as those that involve ethical issues (Lugosi & Jameson, 2017). Hospitality educators also have limited time and space to contemplate the fundamental concepts of education, such as the meaning of teaching, learning and being educated, as their mind is occupied by performance outcomes and learning outcomes (Laverty, 2014). The commercialisation of education is not exclusive to HHE. Even traditional universities, the home of theoretical-based disciplines such as philosophy of education, are under constant pressure to stop complicating theoretical issues and “go practical” because “times are tough, jobs are scarce” (Siegel, 1981, p. 125). Operating in that culture, the “good” education that seeks to immerse young people in serious questions about the ways of being and doing (Biesta, 2015) is omitted or at least demoted.

Thirdly, education does not always need to aim at finding a solution. The hospitality world is extremely fast-paced. It relentlessly demands solutions from its workers, keeping them on their feet twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week. Working in that culture, people have little room to engage in meaningful conversations and contemplate the concepts that extend beyond the realm of economic achievement. They can easily be lost in what Stewart () describes as the mundane of day-to-day practices, or more severely, commit unethical acts in the pursuit of immediate solutions. Research has found that the ubiquitous of unethical behaviours in the hospitality industry, from staff to customers and vice versa, among staff themselves and between staff and the management, links closely to the use of student labour and young employees who have not fully developed a sense of work ethics (Poulston, 2004). They are easily influenced by the bad examples set by their managers, who, in their turn, often ignore ethical standards due to an urge to make quick decisions and meet short-term objectives (Poulston, 2004). Devastatingly, the industry appears to have more concerns over the legal and financial consequences that unethical behaviours may cause (Jaszay, 2002) than the decay of human character. What the industry needs is not another solution for this ethical crisis; it needs silence to revisit its true calling and contemplate its problems.

At the same time, the highly industry-led hospitality education is experiencing the same deficit of silence for contemplation, which O’Donnell (2015) diagnoses as “the collapse of attention” (p. 189). Attention, one of the central concepts in the works of the famous philosopher Simone Weil, describes a state when the mind suspends itself from thoughts and the search for solutions, leaving it “detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object” (Weil, 2001 as cited in Roberts, 2011, p. 321). It is difficult for the HHE sector to find its moment of attention when its mind is constantly burdened by the pressure to keep up with the industry. The last few years have proved how quickly an industry-led HHE programme can lose its relevance. Under the impacts of new regulations, budgetary constraints, labour shortages and technological advancements caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the industry has established a new list of competencies for its workers (Abbas et al., 2021; Sousa et al., 2022), demanding hospitality programmes to adapt (Abbas et al., 2021; Xu et al., 2022). The endless chase for the most updated ”knowledge”, “skills”, and “attitudes” hence, can distract HHE educators from the responsibility to create and foster “attention” among their students, a state of mind that is nearly impossible to achieve in the day-by-day working culture of the industry. The liberation of HHE can only be completed if we can balance its extrinsic drives, presented in the image of the three pillars, “knowledge”, “skills”, and “attitudes”, with the right intrinsic motivation. Stewart (2000) finds that intrinsic drive in the humanisation of education. Humanness, in his view, is the ability to understand a broader range of human experience, including the realm of natural and social sciences, arts and literature, moral and religious understanding and philosophical reflection. He criticises the educational authorities for putting their bias on the objectives of “knowledge”, “skills”, and “attitudes” while ignoring the importance of that understanding in their policies and curriculum. Meanwhile, O’Donnell (2015) suggests a focus on a mindful education. Mindfulness, a concept that links closely to Weil’s attention and Steward’s humanness, depicts an intrinsic ability to observe and engage with the full potential of human life, an antidote to the performative, outcome-driven mentality that is so prevalent in contemporary education. Since “mind” and “heart” are the same words in several languages, mindfulness can be translated into heartfulness (O’Donnell, 2015), making it a perfect expression of the hospitality spirit: solutions of the mind accompanied by the warmth of the heart. Either humanness or mindfulness can be the missing pillar HHE is looking for.

4. Conclusion: toward the true liberation

The commercialised world frequently perceives hospitality as a profession rather than a human virtue. Under pressure to produce an efficient and performative workforce, hospitality education often neglects another honourable mission: to help students develop not just professionally but personally. That neglect reflects in the educational objectives of “knowledge”, “skills”, and “attitudes”, which over-emphasises the role of rationality and analytic capability to solve any problem, including those of human interactions. It can also be observed in the tendency of HHE to mirror the industry’s obsession with performance and effectiveness. Hence, HHE cannot be considered a representative of liberal education in its wholesomeness. In order to complete HHE’s liberation process, it is necessary to build a culture of attention within the educational environment where students and teachers have enough time and space to contemplate and engage in meaningful conversations, which in time will contribute to the formation of mindful practices once students join the workforce.

To conclude the discussion, I would like to mention a very encouraging finding from Morrison and O’Mahony’s (2003) study of the effort to incorporate liberal studies into hospitality education. Two universities, one in Australia and one in Scotland, developed a similar introductory class to hospitality in their undergraduate programmes to equip year one students with reflective knowledge about the hospitality industry and themselves. Feedback from students showed that the class helped them to understand that “hospitality isn’t just an industry, it is a quality that everyone working in the industry should possess. To be hospitable is to care” (p. 42). This delightful remark reminds me of the spark I could observe in my own students’ eyes when we discussed ethics, not as a matter of legal obligation in the business world but as principles exclusive to human beings. The next generations of hospitality workers desire and deserve a truly liberated education that cultivates not only their hands and minds but also their hearts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author received no direct funding for this research.

Notes on contributors

Lan Nguyen Tran

Lan Nguyen Tran has a master’s degree in hotel management and is a lecturer in New Zealand. Her research looks at a variety of social-economical phenomena from a hospitality perspective. With more than 7 years working in the hotel industry, she is passionate about creating and implementing different teaching and assessing methods to equip learners of hospitality with both foundation knowledge and professional skills.