In Defense of Lecturing
In a brand-new piece published by Inside Higher Ed, fetchingly titled “Is Lecturing Racist?,” the authors mock the “gold standard in college teaching . . . a well-organized lecture, preferably delivered with dramatic flair or sprinkled with witticisms and anecdotes, delivered by a highly respected domain expert.”
They argue that “underrepresented minority” (URM) students—“1) women, 2) racial and ethnic minorities other than Asian Americans, 3) students who will be the first in their family to complete a four-year degree, and 4) low-income individuals” perform below their ability in a lecture format, while thriving (their evidence is a grade point increase) in the “active learning” classroom. The natural choice, then, is to convert lecturing into “[active] learning environments where all students can thrive.” The article bemoans the fact that “colleges and universities are designed to resist change” and that “faculty still trot out a long list of reasons why they cannot or should not change the way they teach.” The authors’ indictment is brutal: “Lecturing is comfortable. It’s familiar.”
But lecturing is not simply “comfortable” and “familiar.” It can also be highly effective—take, for example, the recently deceased Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a triple URM (she qualified for (1), (2), and (3) of the above-mentioned traits), a real-life proof that lecturing works. One of the many talents that made the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg an effective scholar of law, a litigator, and later a judge, was her dexterity with language. Ginsburg credited this dexterity, and her understanding that language is more than a tool for communicating the semantic meaning, to the time she was an undergraduate at Cornell, where she attended the lectures by one of the greatest literary figures in the 20th century—Vladimir Nabokov. In an interview from a decade ago, Ginsburg described Nabokov as “a man in love with the sound of words [who] taught [her] the importance of choosing the right word and presenting it in the right word order.” She could not be more explicit in her gratitude to Nabokov as she acknowledged that “he changed the way I read, the way I write. He was an enormous influence.” Elsewhere, Ginsburg referred to the writer as “magnetically engaging” and “not comparable to any other lecturer.”
Nabokov’s lecturing style could now be described as an extreme manifestation of personality-driven, twentieth-century teaching.
Nabokov’s lecturing style could now be described as an extreme manifestation of personality-driven, twentieth-century teaching. Of course, in Nabokov’s case, it was a personality of an exceptionally gifted artist whose principal concern was to reveal to his students the intricacies of good literature—of what he considered to be good literature. Nabokov expressed his judgements of taste without reservation, even facetiously assigning grades to the giants of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Tolstoy got the sole A+, Pushkin and Chekov As, Turgenev A-, Gogol B-, Dostoevsky C-, or D+. Nabokov’s “strong opinions” (the phrase that eventually became the title of his 1973 collected essays) are indexical not only of his literary analysis, but also of his teaching style. The great Russian-American writer was a firm believer in hierarchies.
Nabokov certainly was not teaching to the median student. Looking back at his professorial career at Wellesley and later Cornell, he recalled: “I welcomed the few shorthand experts in my audience, hoping they would communicate the information they stored to their less fortunate comrades.” Nor was Nabokov basing his instruction on real-time feedback from the audience, aware that his way of teaching “precluded genuine contact with [his] students.” It is telling that the writer even considered tape-recording his lectures, so little need had he for an average student’s “feedback.” We learn as much from the 1981 Washington Post article by the eminent Dostoyevsky scholar Joseph Frank:
Nabokov was of course not a professional pedagogue, concerned with imparting information and giving his listeners some acquaintance with a ‘field’—in this case, the Russian literature of which he was one of the most eminent living representatives. And so some of those whom Nabokov affectionately called ‘the backbone of the nation, the industrious army of grade Cs,’ may have been a little put off by Professor Nabokov’s free-wheeling ways.
Although it is safe to say that Nabokov’s teaching was unapologetically elitist, it was not elitist in a social dimension. He aimed his lectures at an elite of sensibility, at students, who like Ruth Bader (not yet Bader Ginsburg), could learn to conjure up images out of words and to use the right words in the right order. Ginsburg was very vocal in recognizing Nabokov’s influence: “Words could paint pictures, I learned from him.” Perhaps the most frequently cited example of Ginsburg’s ability to paint pictures with words, is the umbrella-in-the-rainstorm metaphor used in her dissent in Shelby County v. Holder on the 2013 changes to the Voting Rights Act. Then, there is the insistence on lexical precision, another famous Nabokovian fixation remembered by Ginsburg as: “Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.” “Choosing the right word” in her rewrite of the 2007 Lilly Ledbetter opinion to make it more palatable for the bench delivery, meant Ginsburg adjusting the text to a more colloquial register, and opting for language that was clear, direct and free of the rhetorical flourishes that would be suitable in a written version, but counterproductive in an auditory format.
By the measure of her ability to construct compelling arguments through invoking images, and using the right words, Ginsburg was a living example of Nabokov’s efficacy as a lecturer.
By the measure of her ability to construct compelling arguments through invoking images, and using the right words, Ginsburg was a living example of Nabokov’s efficacy as a lecturer. Nabokov’s subject-oriented lecturing style worked well for students who were bright and willing to learn but were shy and reticent to be the center of attention. The lectures allowed students to delve into the texts, without the distracting burden of an open forum. The way Nabokov operated was predicated on his knowledge, his belief that this knowledge is valuable, and his desire to share his knowledge with the students who exerted themselves to glimpse the images hidden between the lines of great novels. Sometimes, the images revealed themselves decades after the fact: “My best reward,” explained the writer, “comes from those former students of mine who, ten or fifteen years later, write to me to say that they now understand what I wanted of them when I taught them to visualize Emma Bovary’s mistranslated hairdo or the arrangement of rooms in the Samsa household or the two homosexuals in Anna Karenina.” Focusing on art and art alone, Nabokov’s teaching did little to stroke the egos of his students.
Ginsburg was the first one to admit her debt to Nabokov’s teaching method, underscoring how illogical it is to condemn the inherently hierarchical and taste-based nature of lecturing. The currently fashionable assault on lecturing is at best a myopic fad, and at worst a case of closet schadenfreude. The basic claim behind the denigration of lecturing as a teaching method is that it is not sufficiently “student-oriented.” Students, we are told, learn better when they can relate to the material on a personal level. Clearly, the operating assumption here is that the material on offer is fundamentally boring, so that the only way to make it more digestible is to present everything through the prism of students’ “lived experience.” The classroom, then, becomes “an interactive learning space” and college professors turn into “learning facilitators.” Out with the lectures and in with the “active learning”! The next time an opponent of lecturing asserts the supposed superiority of “student-oriented” learning, it might be worth pondering whether an anti-meritocratic classroom dedicated to the safe space exchange of (certain) personal viewpoints and “lived experiences” inadvertently stunts the intellect of students, reaffirming whatever prejudices and superstitions they brought to the classroom in the first place.