The following excerpt is taken from The Concept of a University by Kenneth Minogue (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973).

On the Nature of Lectures: Part I

There are plenty of other critics who are very serious indeed about understanding such things as lectures as being essentially no more than what they appear: a way of telling people things. It is certainly true that as a device for transmitting information lectures are absurdly inefficient. Any student can read a published lecture in a fraction of the time it takes to deliver it. But this does not take us very far.

The clue to the real character of lectures may be found in Plato's argument, in the Seventh Letter, that there are some things which cannot suitably be written down, and that the tradition of inquiry must pass from pupil to master like a spark. He no doubt meant a great deal by this image; but part of what he meant is that a tradition of learning is not simply a quantum of information, but a certain attitude to it—a set of nuances which appear in the tone of voice that is used and in the choice of things to be qualified along the path of the exposition. A lecture, to adapt an old legal maxim, is a speaking book, and those who listen to a lecture are absorbing, partly consciously and partly unconsciously, a certain manner of reading books and treating the information they acquire.

Seen in this light, a lecture is a ceremonial device for diffusing some particular tradition of learning: it deals with a subject conceived not abstractly as the set of assertions that might usefully be found in textbook or an encyclopedia, but as the intellectual resources by which a continuing inquiry into some aspect of things is being conducted. It is true that wherever classes and tutorials abound—as is often the case in British universities—lectures are a less necessary way of rendering a subject 'vivid' in this sense. But something of this sort must exist, for it is by his grip upon the vividness of a subject that an educated man is to be distinguished from the self-taught man who has applied himself to books. Although differing native abilities produce wide variations, the man whose learning has come exclusively from books is at the mercy of whatever level of knowledge there is when he acquires his learning. The raison d'etre of universities is, by contrast, to pass on the kind of tentative and exploratory understanding which leads academics to regard most books as merely progress reports.

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