preview

Summary Of The Perceptions Of On-Campus Living

Good Essays

Perceptions of On-Campus Living As a college student, I can attest to the fact that college is nothing like the home I grew up in. Conor Friedersdorf’s “A College Is a Community but Cannot Be a Home” attempts to target college administrators in order to make this misconstrued belief clear. Throughout the article, he makes several strong arguments to explain how students feel in a college setting, and how the current conceptions of what on-campus housing entails are not necessarily accurate. He writes to bring about change in the ideas of college administrators, so they can acknowledge the hardships of the transitions for students rather than trying to make such an environment something it truly “cannot” be. While Friedersdorf appeals to the …show more content…

Throughout the piece, he explains the struggles of a college student and how a home strongly differs from on-campus living. In doing so, he leads his audience to feel for the students, making them and want to bring about change that will allow the college students to transition better into a setting that is unfamiliar. While, as stated in the article, many continue to believe that living on a college campus becomes a home to students, Friedersdorf argues that it “cannot be.” His argument about how “college is not a home” was written to convince the reader to agree with him and generate change. To do so, he targets college administrators and those who can make a difference towards the views of administrators, as they can bring about change in the current ways of how on-campus living is construed. Therefore, it is clear that Friedersdorf did not write this article for the sole purpose of making his opinion known to a general audience. Instead, he targets this specific discourse community and stresses the emotions that will specifically appeal to its members. By using emotional appeal in a way that focuses on his specific audience, Friedersdorf works to encourage his audience to enforce change in current college …show more content…

In this example, he uses the scenario of talking around the dinner table that most would associate with home, which, once again, instills nostalgia in the reader. This makes a powerful point in the paragraph. By leading the readers to think about their own homes, Friedersdorf causes us to truly understand his point that these dinner table conversations do not have a place in a setting as diverse as a college campus. He makes it clear that one of the reasons that “college cannot be a home” is the fact that students cannot “lower their guards” in the way that they can at home around the dinner table. The author argues this to be an inherent result of students with varying backgrounds being brought together in a place of learning. He does not necessarily believe it to be positive or negative, but rather a consideration that must be made by his target audience which pushes them to agree with the argument at hand. In making this distinction between the limitations of self-expression in on-campus living and the freedoms of self-expression at home, Friedersdorf argues that students’ way of living is forcibly altered on

Get Access