Eisenkraft's Racism In The Academy

In “Racism in the Academy,” Eisenkraft (2010) tried to make her audience of academics in the Canadian universities authentically realize the existence of racism in university faculties, thus offer recommendations to improve the present situations and expressed an optimistic attitude of the improvement for the institution. To support her argument, she employed several rhetorical strategies: she employed the logical appeal by using facts, and evidence from university faculties; she employed an extrinsic ethical appeals by quoting words from experts who exactly from the environment in which faculties suffer discrimination. She appealed to intrinsic ethos by selecting particular words to make her audience conjure up the seriousness of the deepseated

For instance, at the introduction part, she cited Peter Li’s, Monture’s, Smith’ s stories that vividly displayed “what racism has looked like in the Canadian Academy”; she mentioned the fact that “prejudices in the last century has been changed”, and what the government and universities have done in order to make changes. She also uses examples to show “backlash” of making improvement of racist phenomenon. Later, she cited statistics from census to demonstrate the issues in university faculty, and use facts to back up her discussion of “presentation”, “merits”, “fit” and “promotions”. When the author gave recommendations, she also used facts about some “shifts already happened in Canadian campuses” to show her suggestions are effective. Overall, the repetitive use of facts, words and anecdotes by those people who exactly from Canadian campuses make the author’s statements credible, and convince the readers the existence of racism

For example, when citing Dr. Li’s words, she indicated that Dr.Li is “a professor who specialize in race, inequality, and immigration.” In fact, whenever the authors use anecdotes, or opinions from a person, she cleared indicated the identity of the person, which shows a lot credibility. In addition, the author appeals to intrinsic ethos by well organization of the content. She asked “ How does this Happen?” to arouse readers’ thoughts at the very beginning; she used plenty of transitional words, so as to make her idea arranged logically and easy to catch up. For example, the use of “ the issue starts with presentation”, “the topic of presentation always leads to a discussion of merit”, “ After hiring and promotion committees have dealt with the issue of merit” create a clear order in readers’ mind. Also, because one of the main purpose is to make people be aware of the existence of racism in academy, the author spend specially a great length on introduction part, talking about anecdotes, background, backlash, and the impact of racism so as to sketch a clear contour about what really happened in Canadian academy, which contribute to help readers understand the further discussion: issues and recommendations. What also prominent is that the author provided terms explanation and view from others at the end of this article. That indeed make audience feel this article is authoritative.