8th December, 2014

Spotlight on Liberal Arts Education

Every educated student knows that the best way to convince a friend or an audience is to
use the three rhetorical strategies. No matter the situation, ethos, pathos and logos are the key to
the audiences heart. Ethos establishes credibility; it shows the audience that what you are saying
is reliable and trustworthy. Pathos evokes emotions, such as passion, hate or fear, in order to grab
the audience. Logos mostly means logic but is not just presented in statistics and numbers. It can
be shown in pushing your viewpoint as absolute truth and in the style and tone presented in the
argument. These rhetorical strategies are targeted directly to the brain. In the Ted Talk, A call to
reinvent liberal arts education, Liz Coleman discusses the oversimplification of civic
engagement and neutrality as a condition of academic integrity. She carefully and prestigiously
uses ethos, pathos and logos in order to present the issue.
Establishing a credible ethos is very important in order to get the audience to believe and
trust what you are saying is the truth. Coleman establishes her ethos by saying, she is the
president of a leading liberal arts college, she is referring to Bennington. By telling her
audience that she is the president of Bennington, she shows that she is very well-educated on the
topic she is presenting. Another way she establishes ethos is the way she uses strong and
academic vernacular, but more importantly she says in the language of my students, which
shows that she has more than a secondary education and is a professor. Using the strong and
academic vernacular, this is directly connected to her audience of high secondary educated
students . To anyone who does not fit into her target audience, the talk may seem to be boring or
over their heads. If you fit into her audience, the use of strong diction helps; you to see her
credentials. This allows the audience to see where she is coming from through her credentials,

but she needed to convince them she is an expert on the issue of reinventing liberal arts
education. Coleman takes the audience to the whole problem by going to the beginning of it:
the story begins in the late '90s. I was invited to meet with leading educators from the newly
free Eastern Europe and Russia. They were trying to figure out how to rebuild their universities.
This adds to her credibility since she has insider information that most people do not know.
Coleman has tons of ethos from her speech but the way that it is delivered is the most important
part of it. She adds another level of credibility just by presenting it in her own way, by giving
the audience personal hands on experiences that she has seen.
When considering pathos, it is not hard to understand it or hard to find emotional
connections that relate to the audience. Since the human brain relates memories to emotional
connections, such as sight or sound, this is easier to grasp and relate to. The way that Coleman
brings in fear is by saying, our public education, once a model for the world, has become most
noteworthy for its failures. Everyone thinks that America is the symbol of greatness from
freedom to education but this quote rejects this idea. It puts fear in the American audience since
their truth is no longer the actual truth. Since her target audience is students going into college,
she grabs them by saying, the progression of today's college student is to jettison every interest
except one. And within that one, to continually narrow the focus, learning more and more about
less and less; this, despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things. This is
also meant to bring in fear, by showing students that American secondary education is not as
strong as everyone thinks it is ,but in reality to the students it is used as a turning point.
In connecting ethos to pathos, Coleman used a quote from Thomas Jefferson: if a nation
expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was, and never will
be. This is used to show how the fundamental ideas that set up this country and colleges are

deteriorating at the core, and this is a massive problem. Without realizing the problem there can
be no real change. The way in which she grabs the more technological students is creating the
bridge which seems to be between these very different worlds. She creates this bridge by saying,
when making connections is of the essence, the power of technology emerges with special
intensity. It shows that both the technological and liberal arts worlds are not opposites, but they
cannot survive without each other.
Besides bringing in fear, she also shines the light at the end of the tunnel by giving the
audience a game plan which will change the direction of liberal arts for the better by intending
to turn the intellectual and imaginative power, passion and boldness of our students, faculty and
staff to developing strategies for acting on the critical challenges of our time. The use of
Colemans pathos creates fear, but also draws up an outline in that by reinventing the liberal arts
the world will be a better place. She also shows how technology and liberal arts cannot survive
without one another. Without these elements that make up the pathos, the speech would not have
been as connected to the audience.
Logos reaches the reasoning part of the brain and draws the audience to believe the
argument more. Logos is not just about statistics or numbers, but it can come from how you
make your argument the only possible truth without any leeway, the style and the organization of
it; never forget the facts that are used in it as well. Coleman did not use numbers or statistics, but
she had an abundance of facts. She used [Eastern Europe and Russia] came to the United States,
home of liberal arts education, to talk with some of us most closely identified with that kind of
education. She also stated that in truth, liberal arts education no longer exists - at least genuine
liberal arts education - in this country. This shows the reason why leading educators from
Eastern Europe and Russia came to America, in order to use our colleges as a leading model for

the reinvestments of liberal arts. It is also a good way to introduce her audience into the leading
problem with liberal arts. From there, Coleman uses logos to show that America is no longer the
model for liberal arts education, by saying that we have professionalized liberal arts to the point
where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for civic
engagement that is their signature. This allows for her audience to visualize where the role of
liberal arts has come from. The reason is shown by over the past century the expert has
dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment;
which shows where the path of the liberal arts came from and the way it is in the present day. It
is more of her logos because it is not common knowledge or cited from other reports or other
leading research. Instead of just explaining the path that liberal arts has taken, she shows how it
has changed in the relevance and connection to other areas of study: subject matters are broken
up into smaller and smaller pieces, with increasing emphasis on the technical and the obscure.
We have even managed to make the study of literature arcane.
Coleman also uses her own style and organization that led to the emphasis of logos, the
use of educated language. Her rate of speech when speaking starts out slow and then gains
momentum. . At first she introduces the problem with more of a start to a story and then you can
hear the urgency of the problem by the way she speaks faster and more direct. Her ideas also
build on top of each other from the beginning of the issue, to the need for change and the ways
she is trying to resolve the issue, to gaining awareness to the inventing liberal arts education.
Coleman does this by addressing all of these needs in the talk ,with dire consequences if they are
not fixed . All of these little pieces make up the big strategy of logos.
Overall, without having strong pieces of evidence to back up ethos, pathos and logos
arguments will not be strong enough to convince anyone to hear or back your argument. Through

her talk, A call to reinvent liberal arts education, Liz Coleman goes above and beyond using
these rhetorical strategies in order to bring attention to how bad without fixing liberal arts can be
for education in general. I did not like Liz Colemans talk; to me the way it was presented was
too educated. It did not help me fully understand the need for reinventing the liberal arts, since
I am more passionate about improving technology. It does help me see that there is a bridge
between these two worlds though. I cannot deny that her use of ethos, pathos and logos did not
help draw me in to continue to finish the talk. I understand the need for a call to action in the area
of liberal arts, but I am not as enthusiastic about it as Coleman is. Without the rhetorical
strategies, the talk would not have been as effective as it was.

Bibliography
1. Liz Coleman. A call to reinvent liberal arts education. Ted Talk .February
2009.Video.November 19, 2014.
http://www.ted.com/talks/liz_coleman_s_call_to_reinvent_liberal_arts_education?langua
ge=en#t-26317