‘Was there ever such stuff as some parts of Shakespeare?’, that learned and illustrious critic, King George III, once exclaimed, ‘Only one must not say so!’.
When you’re first starting at university, you are warned, quite seriously, that you must attend your lectures if you want to get your first. Here at Oxford, the University offers all sorts of different lectures throughout its many faculties and departments, some compulsory (or so I’ve been told), some interesting, many allegedly helpful for passing exams. Tutors seem keen to encourage us to not only attend these, but even to listen to the lecturers. But is there really any point in attending lectures? And do they serve any purpose other than to give the lecturers the pleasure of torturing students for hours at a time?
With tutorials, classes, seminars, and set reading, it doesn’t really seem as if attending lectures should be anyone’s highest priority. An hour spent half-listening to a lecture could be more rewardingly spent reading for an essay, or for pleasure (if anyone remembers that). And unless your tutor is the lecturer, no one will even remember if you were there anyway. The real question is why are we here? Is it to sit prone in a darkened room and hope to absorb all the content for our exams in fifty minutes? Or is it actually to improve ourselves and our thinking?
A big lie is being circulated around the colleges: you can meet people at lectures, they say. This is not true. Do not believe it. I have never met anyone at a lecture, and have never met anyone who has ever met anyone at a lecture. A lecture is not a social outing. If you find that your lectures are, you’re doing it wrong. The lecture is, by its nature, focused on the individual lecturer who proclaims his views or, as the case may be, shows his carefully prepared slides. Of course academics want you to come to their lectures: this is their moment to shine. After so many years of long, laborious nights, ink-stained fingers, and social invisibility, now is their time, all eyes are on them – they have to be, the eyes have been instructed by the faculty to be directed in a slightly vacant fashion towards the general vicinity of the lecturer, and the mouths (mirabile dictu!) have been ordered shut at last. Keep silent and listen, all will be revealed!
What will be revealed though? When so many lectures simply correspond to paper options, for which we have tutorials and reading anyway, what is unique about the lecture that merits not only the fifty minutes (if mercifully the lecturer keeps to time) spent actually listening but also the time wasted travelling to and fro?
Maybe you want some more structure in your life; your free time needs to be put to some other use than just scrolling on X (formerly known as Twitter) and buying coffee. But there are other, more edifying solutions than simply attending lectures. John Henry Newman wrote that if he had to choose between a ‘so-called University’ which awarded degrees based on examination alone (sounds suspiciously familiar) and sending young people off together for three or four years, with no teachers or tutors but only each other to learn from, he would choose the latter. If we can be ‘keen, open-hearted, sympathetic, and observant’, our conversation will be our lectures, our friends our lecturers, and our actions will give us much more to think about than a muffled voice in a darkened room.
Lectures are not necessary for our learning (though I concede that lectures can on rare occasions be somewhat interesting even if just for a fleeting moment). If you are otherwise planning on being idle, you might as well march off to your lectures and sit down and try to listen. But, if you can plan your time, keep track of your deadlines, and arrange your reading, you can make your degree a great deal more interesting than lectures and lecture halls.
And really, was there ever such stuff as a great part of our lectures? Only we must not say so!