Analysis Of Mark Edmundson's Essay 'Why Teach?'

In his book Why Teach?, Mark Edmundson has written an essay in which he approaches an argument about the paradoxical consumer culture surrounding education. The university professor takes a stance on the problems that he has both experienced in his own classroom and observed on campuses, and he assigns these problems—his claims—appropriate blames. Enough logic is used to make these “blames” more factual, and he often claims how things are and offers several reasons as to why. His essay, “Liberal Arts & Lite Entertainment,” originally written in 1997, begins with his own university before branching out to all those across the country, and it is followed by a deduction of student culture and professors. He gives hope to the idea of the acceptance and praising of “genius” (as opposed to the alienation students indorse so well) closer towards the end, narrowing his argument down to a more specific change
He talks specifically about the “buyer’s market” known as college, and how its recent changes now “serve . . . the students” (14). Similarly to his previous section, logos is apparent here, more so than any other rhetoric appeal. His claim that universities are “customer driven” in order to survive in an “ever more competitive market” is his main point, and he shapes this claim based on the evidence of not only America’s history and the expansion of its universities, but also how the universities and even departments are collapsing to the whims of the students and their tuition-paying parents (12). Universities have begun to appeal to students not by offering them a thought-provoking and stimulating education and proposing to them what sort of people they will shape out of those willing to learn, but by enticing students with the promise of the fun social activities they will have available to them once they are released from their boring