Why Is The Professor Lecturing

Centuries ago when knowledge was transcribed by hand, and written documents were rare treasures, in the centers of learning the chance to hear a lecture was central, because as the word lecture means, a reading, it was the chance to have read to you what otherwise you would not know nor to which you could not gain access.  It was more than anything a dictation, although in most instances presumably the hearers contented themselves with making a precis of what was being read.  The advent of the printing press meant that more and more students could gain access to the written knowledge on their own and indeed share it.  Although reasons to lecture grew less urgent, the form was retained, principally because the academy does not alter the way it does things over the centuries.  Conserve, preserve, the past is the present.  More able and more original lecturers began to embellish their reading with ideas and observations of their own.  This is the ideal of the modern university lecture class, but it is interesting how technology has radically changed the game.  To begin with, there is really no reason for a lecture, since almost invariably the speaker is offering something that can be found in the library already printed in books.  It is a convenience to the hearer who does not want to make the effort to read through a book on the subject, or who wants the several points of view that might be contained in a variety of books which the speaker has read and synthesized.  But as the world is made up principally of dull and unimaginative people, time servers, and they are legion in the academy, one cannot count on getting more than just what the book says in a lecture.  A very brilliant professor of my acquaintance in talking about poetry in her lecture class forbids the students taking notes, speaks to the poem which she has put on an illuminated screen in front of the group, and expects them to make the intellectual effort of synthesis and retention with nothing more than the brain to form and contain.  Nowadays it is the custom for the students to arrive with their laptops.  I am so thankful I retired before this invention became common.  Once the lap top is opened students are free when their attention wanders to bring up other screens, play computer games, for instance, a little chess or crossword puzzle work, while only so often switching back to the screen on which they are typing in notes.  I think that is called "multi-tasking," and is supposed to be the mark of the bright new generation.  It is amusing or depressing to sit in the back of a large lecture hall and see the enormous range of programs on display as all the while the professor intones from the lecture platform some subject which we must imagine is dear to his heart.  A professor friend of mine who had generously acceded to the request of a graduate student to sit in for credit on her major lecture course, noticed one day when her assistant was doing the lecturing and my friend had taken a seat at the back of the lecture hall that this graduate student was seriously engaged in watching a dance contest on her screen.  When a break came, my friend went over and quietly closed the younger person's laptop, to which the response was sullen resignation rather than even the teeniest bit of embarrassment and remorse.  Why don't they just all go home?