Have We Forgotten How to Listen to Lectures?

Seasoned readers of this column may recall an earlier appreciation of the benefits of boredom, specifically when it is brought on by reading less-than-compelling history books. But reading is not the only way we absorb – or, it may be, fail to absorb – the insights of historians. Another is listening to lectures. Unlike a book or a podcast, the lecture is a mode of communication which affords the audience less scope for a swift escape from tedium. If present, they cannot simply snap it shut and turn to something more stimulating. For the duration, they remain trapped.

How they behave while trapped seems to have changed in recent years, as I have observed not only while lecturing, but as the organiser of an annual series of public lectures in intellectual history. Once upon a time disconsolate glances might be cast covertly at the crawling hands of the clock, eyelids might close, heads nod, and seated figures begin to teeter (but somehow, by an unconscious knack, always save themselves from toppling). Even the occasional snore might become unignorably audible, to suppressed amusement elsewhere in the room. But a sense of courtesy and propriety prompted valiant if stupefied efforts to conceal these reactions from the lecturer.

Nowadays little attempt appears to be made to stifle yawns and hide other manifestations of boredom. In part, this may be attributed to a contemporary belief in the unqualified right to self-assertion; in part, to the fact that most listeners are so accustomed to watching or listening to lectures on their own devices that they retain little awareness that they are, for once, in the room with the lecturer and others. In many universities, especially since the pandemic, lectures are available at the touch of a button; attending in person is an antediluvian chore. And precisely because lectures are now in-person vodcasts, fewer and fewer are capable of listening attentively for a whole uninterrupted hour. They are used to pausing, rewinding, and replaying. Their attention spans are increasingly short. They yearn for distraction, especially on a screen. To an extent, desperate lecturers collude. Powerpoint slides flash by in an attempt to satisfy the audience’s craving for at least two things to be going on at once. If a book is being discussed, a giant image of its dustjacket will appear. How this might assist with understanding its contents is unclear. But images have become the main event; the lecture is just an oral accompaniment, the lecturer an off-screen commentator, no longer the cynosure. Sometimes every quotation is read from a slide. It helps to fill the hour. Is it any wonder that oratorical effort has diminished?

Many lecturers report the same regrettable characteristics in contemporary audiences. I have suggested reasons for them. It is important to appreciate, however, that although they may have become much more noticeable of late, they are not new.

Consider, for instance, the following strictures, delivered in a lecture on how audiences should listen to lectures. They should: 

sit upright without any lounging or sprawling, look directly at the speaker, maintain an attentive pose, and a placidness of countenance free from any expression, not only of arrogance or displeasure, but even of other thoughts and preoccupations.

Moreover, they should avoid:

not only frowning, a sour face, a roving glance, twisting the body about and crossing the legs … but even whispering to each other, sleepy yawns, and allowing their heads to droop.

This sage advice was tendered by Plutarch at the beginning of the second century AD.

Plutarch was not primarily concerned with how the audience comport themselves physically, but, far more, with how they do so mentally – with their engagement with what they are listening to. They are not passive receptors, but should be active participants. Just as the lecturer has obligations to them, so they do to him. They must adapt themselves to his style, just as they would if playing ball with him. They must learn to listen before they can themselves lecture, otherwise what they say will be so much flatulence. Before they can listen fruitfully, ingenuous, ignorant conceit – and the envy and/or disdain for the lecturer to which it gives rise – must be banished. Only then will it be possible to graduate from the lazy dismissal of the efforts of others, to the far more exacting task of lecturing oneself. The point is to develop discrimination, and in particular to learn not to be swept along by meretricious fluency and other sophistry. Productive listening requires intense intellectual effort, which penetrates behind the oral performance to the reasoning it seeks to render aurally accessible: 

For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.

However boring a lecture may at first seem, if it can kindle such a flame in the minds of at least a few acute listeners, it has achieved more than the most rhetorically polished but vacuous of performances. And what was true of philosophy lectures 1,900 years ago remains true of academic lectures now. Powerpoint distractions notwithstanding, they retain the potential to communicate the insights of individuals in shorter, more intense order than the written word.

Having said all that, I recall my relief at the end of an apparently interminable lecture by one of the world’s leading authorities on a subject about which I, and many of the audience, already knew a fair amount. Few in the room could have learnt anything new. One of my pupils was sitting in front of me. She turned round and said with a sigh: ‘I live in Milton Keynes, and even I have never been that bored before.’

George Garnett is Professor of Medieval History at Oxford University and Fellow of St Hugh’s College.