Analysis Of Fighting Your University By Mark Edmundson

Fighting Your University? The article "Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here? A Word to the Incoming Class" is written by Mark Edmundson who is an English professor at the University of Virginia. Edmundson's article is, as mentioned in the article title, a word to the incoming class. In this article, he reflects on what it means to get a proper or "real" education at a university or college. I will be focusing on what Edmundson means by getting a "real education" as this relates to me as a college student. In this reflection, I will be finding out why in order to get this type of education, you have to fight the university itself and why the university itself is a target for this fight. My examples that I picked to support this involve Edmundson
What does he mean by this? Perhaps confronting your professors. Edmundson states, "If you want to get a real education, you're going to have to fight" (Edmundson 406). Here, he clearly states that if you want this so called "real education" you have to fight for it. The author emphasizes this idea of fighting a lot throughout the article and I believe that is him trying to prove that point. As a college student, I can relate a bit to this idea of having to fight. In the beginning of my first semester of college, My classes along with the professors were not the best. I think that Edmundson means that when you fight, you are not targeting the whole institute which you attend, but more specifically, the
Edmundson states, ""professors don't pay full-bore attention to teaching, they don't have to work very hard-they've created a massive feather bed for themselves and called it a university" (Edmundson 408). I think by this, Edmundson means that professors feel like once their job is secure at their institute, they don't truly focus on the teaching aspect of their job. This is one problem that I have faced personally and another reason why I relate to this article. In the beginning of my first semester, I took a course where the professor would show up, lecture for the full duration, then dismiss us. The problem with this is that professors do not engage with their students, they lecture about the information but do not help us to understand this information that they are telling us. As Edmundson further explains, these types of professors are not ambitious, they secure their job at a university and feel as if they don't have to fully apply their teaching ability, just assign the course work on the syllabus and expect us students to get it done. If we were to "fight" our school, we would target those select teachers who feel that just lecturing in class would suffice as