Henry Schneiderman | 2026 I.S. Symposium
Name: Henry Schneiderman
Title: Call the Roll: Analyzing John F. Kennedy’s Epideictic Advocacy at Loyola College for Educational Reform in the United States
Major: Communication Studies
Minor: Political Science
Pathway: Digital and Visual Storytelling
Advisor: Denise Bostdorff
This study examined a relatively unknown speech from John F. Kennedy’s extensive collection — his epideictic address at the Loyola College Annual Alumni Banquet. In these remarks, Kennedy argued for the necessity of educational reform in the United States to find success in the Cold War through the use of epideictic rhetoric. As such, this study aimed to answer the question of: how did Kennedy utilize epideictic rhetoric at Loyola College to persuade his audience towards the idea of educational reform’s necessity in the United States? To answer this question, these remarks were analyzed through the use of generic criticism — a subsect of rhetorical criticism — to define how the then senator utilized the genre of epideictic rhetoric to influence his listeners. Results from the generic criticism analysis found that Kennedy employed two epideictic strategies in pursuit of a successful persuasion at the Loyola banquet. First, he assumed a pedagogical role to heighten the chances of audience engagement and to lower the risk of interruption. Second, he engaged in an epideictic progression in which he crafted an on-going dissociation between Americans’ myth of self-proclaimed superiority over the Soviet Union in the intellectual Cold War and the opposite reality of the matter that saw the U.S. lagging in this area of the conflict and in danger of consequence as a result. This was done in an effort to define the issue at hand to his audience so that they would in turn more easily adopt his proposed solution of educational reform in the United States. This study provides an in-depth analysis into the makings of an effective epideictic speech and can be examined both for methods to analyze epideictic rhetoric in future research and for how to craft effective epideictic addresses for one’s own rhetoric.
Posted in Symposium 2026 on May 1, 2026.
