As the university year draws once more to its close, let us pause to pity the poor unloved lecture. Nobody, we are told, really likes them. In a recent article in the Cambridge student newspaper Varsity, an undergraduate groused about having to make the effort to attend a form of teaching she considered a low priority. In a busy life of socialising, “extracurriculars”, and supervisions (which at Cambridge even the most workshy cannot avoid because it’s just you, the lecturer and two or three other students), something — obviously — has to go.
Attendance at university lectures isn’t compulsory, and for this student, “when lecture slides are available online, with the bulk of information accessible from my room, dragging myself to the lecture is not only a challenge but seems a waste of time”. Yet there is always the nagging possibility a lecture might contain some vital nugget. Her solution? That academics should provide students with videoed lectures to watch at home.
Such an attitude will exasperate many who were not privileged enough to have access to such an education. It is worth remembering that for each student who makes it to Cambridge, many more will be rejected: the university currently receives roughly six applicants per place, although for popular subjects the number is higher. We must presume that among the rejects there are many conscientious young people who would have grasped every available opportunity to learn, had they been given the chance.
But lectures get bad press more widely these days, mocked as long, droning monologues by tweedy old dons who can’t make eye contact. In reality, you would be hard-pressed to find any such lectures: most now include at least some element of student interaction. Nevertheless, many academics now prefer seminars, based on the principle of the “flipped classroom”, whereby students read up on topics or undertake activities in advance and come to class poised for discussion. Obviously this depends on the willingness of students to undertake the set work, and most academics, if pushed, will admit that this expectation is increasingly optimistic. We need both formats: tutorials too, if resources allow.
Some academics now consider the traditional lecture ideologically suspect because it is a “hierarchical” mode of delivery. I have also had many a wearying conversation on social media with fellow academics who are hostile to the very idea that teaching should be about the dissemination of knowledge, a way of thinking rooted in postmodern scepticism about the possibility of objective truth. Down with facts! Up with critical thinking! But critical thinking in the absence of knowledge can degenerate swiftly into an unscholarly exchange of personal opinions, and students have to grapple with complex scholarly literature they don’t have the intellectual foundations to make sense of.
Of course lectures can be bad. Not everyone has the gift of being able to hold a room, and the teacher training courses universities put junior academics through typically offer minimal guidance on delivery. Nobody wants to sit there listening to someone reading out PowerPoint slides, though this tendency may actually have been worsened by the expectation that lecturers must provide online materials that replicate the classroom experience for those at home.
What has happened to basic intellectual curiosity?
But when done well, lectures can be utterly illuminating, when you are listening to a brilliant speaker discuss a topic about which they have more knowledge than anyone else in the world. Why wouldn’t a student who has signed up to study with such an expert want to hear them speak, and be there in the room, with the possibility of asking them to clarify and expand? What has happened to basic intellectual curiosity?
It puzzles me, incidentally, that lectures aren’t compulsory and that there is a widespread assumption they couldn’t be. In lectures at my redbrick university in the 1990s, we had to sign a register. I don’t know what would have happened to persistent absentees, but none of us were tempted to find out. Why would you disadvantage yourself for the exam by not showing up to hear the very person who would be setting it? With no supplementary seminars or tutorials available this was our only opportunity. In any case, the lectures were interesting: we were there to learn and we wanted to learn.
Acquiring factual knowledge is not only a valid part of what it means to receive an education but a vital one
Unfashionable though it may be to say so, I believed then and I believe now that acquiring factual knowledge is not only a valid part of what it means to receive an education but a vital one. For many years I taught courses on opera to students who had never seen one and knew nothing about opera except it was supposedly “elitist”. By the end, those students had acquired a great deal of knowledge and a potential lifelong passion — the interactive lectures were transformative for them. Yes, they could have picked up some information from books, but they needed a specialist to guide them through it, bring it to life, and share research findings so new they hadn’t yet even appeared in print.
There was no possibility of videoing lectures to view on demand when I was an undergraduate, and I suspect few of my contemporaries would have found its removal of human contact an appealing prospect. However, it’s an idea that has been circulating ever since students became “paying customers”. A decade ago, a Guardian commentator characterised face-to-face lectures as “lazy and damaging”, “pointless” and “an insult to the audience”, and chastised them for imposing upon students the “tyranny” of having to turn up to a specific place at a specific time.
Videos were the way to go, apparently, and of course they were later boosted by the pandemic. But let us imagine the rather pitiful scenario to which this ultimately leads: isolated students, alone on screens in their bedrooms, and a sad academic addressing a camera in an empty lecture hall, aware that next year the university will probably make them redundant and just replay the video.
Literary festival talks, the Reith Lectures, TED talks, public lectures at Gresham College — different beasts from university lectures, of course, but all of them show that there is still a basic human appetite to learn from experts sharing their wisdom. How strange, then, that the lecture should be regarded with such mistrust in the very place where it was invented: the university lecture hall.
