The College Lecture Today: An Interdisciplinary Defense for the Contemporary University addresses the value of the lecture in higher education. There is currently a move to end the lecture, as too traditional, too removed from the students, and ineffectual. As universities evaluate professors according to metrics that direct classroom pedagogy away from the lecture, the universities question the value of the lecture in the classroom.



This text offers a defense of the lecture in the university classroom. It does so by asking such questions as, “What is a lecture,” “What is its place and value in the university,” “Can the lecture be improved with technology?” and “What evidence shows that the lecture is pedagogically effective?” The text offers answers to these questions from an interdisciplinary group of experts talking about a broad range of topics. The chapters come from experts in a wide range of disciplines, such as history, art history, literature, foreign languages, media studies, religion, and political science. In this book readers will find thoughtful, well written, and challenging chapters from various disciplines on the value of the lecture in the contemporary university classroom.

Kirk Fitzpatrick, Professor of Philosophy, Southern Utah University

A century ago Aldous Huxley complained the lecturer’s “voice still drones and brays just as it droned and brayed in the days of Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. Lecturers are as much an anachronism as bad drains or tallow candles; it is high time they were got rid of it.” These complaints persist today because the college lecture persists, yet for important pedagogical reasons that the contributors to this volume demonstrate. They show how the good lecturer initiates students into a tradition of learning; provides a synoptic account of the discipline; engages in dialogue with students; connects the subject matter to the students’ most pressing concerns; and earns their trust by establishing a forum that instead of producing doctrinaire or ideological monologue, “invites people to listen collectively about the highest and most important things in life with no winners or losers after it is finished… rooted in the hope that the truth can be shared among all.”

John von Heyking, University of Lethbridge

The lecture is dead in education! Or so we are constantly being lectured. The College Lecture Today offers a robust response to that bit of conventional wisdom, giving teachers and professors the arguments they need to defend the traditional lecture—but also the tools they need to make sure their own lectures do not suffer from the dry-as-dust syndrome that spawned the conventional wisdom for so long. From art history and literature to media studies and political philosophy, the reader will find theory and practices to defend this ancient form. The lecture is dead? Long live the lecture!

David Deavel, Editor, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Visiting Assistant Professor of Catholic Studies at University of St. Thomas

Offering a defense of the lecture as an essential and effective pedagogical technique, The College Lecture Today provides a pointed criticism of the all too familiar position in the scholarship on teaching and learning that there is student-centered learning and nothing else. The vision of the lecture that emerges here is dynamic, flexible, and more than capable of adopting to a continuously changing academic environment. Rather than a science, the collection of chapters from various disciplinary perspectives in the humanities and social sciences is unified by a vision of teaching as an art where the lecture is one of many important tools available to the teacher.

Jordon Barkalow, Associate Professor of Political Science, Co-Coordinator of the Program in Philosophy, Politics, & Economics (PPE), Bridgewater State University