Making Lectures More than Notes

Years ago, German sociologist Max Weber wrote that America's expectations of a successful young academic were such that he could "draw large crowds of students" to his lectures. His charisma, his style and his temperament were more significant motivations for a student to enroll in a lecture class than the material itself.

Of course, in today's university, rarely does a lecturer's style, or his charisma, motivate students to enroll in his class. Especially at Harvard, with our rigid Core Curriculum and concentration requirements, students oftentimes enroll in courses out of sheer necessity. They actually choose to attend the lectures only to collect the material that will allow them to pass.

But, with the creation of StudentU.com, a new Internet venture that provides lecture notes from 62 universities across the nation free of charge, this most compelling incentive to attend class has become obsolete. In a recent New York Times article the Web site's creator, Oran Wolf, explained that he launched StudentU.com with the intention of helping student improve their notes or to help them catch up to the speed of the class should they have fallen ill and missed a lecture or two.

Inevitably, StudentU.com will also be much appreciated by students too hung over to attend classes, too lazy to get out of bed and too well aware that their lecture classes are merely a 50-minute period when their professor reads, rambles, or spits out (hopefully coherent) information about a subject.

And that is what makes StudentU.com, a site created to assist the victims of sniffily noses and stomach-aches, a call to action to lecturing professors around the nation.

No longer does the threat of a midterm draw students to class. Section quizzes on lecture material mean not a thing. Forever gone are hand cramps, loose-leaf paper, lost pen caps and spiral notebooks; a syllabus to follow the reading material and a computer with Internet access provide a more compact and complete explanation of the course.

Yet missing from this equation is a component never to be recreated in any electronic form--the intellectual buzz of a lecture hall, the students' awe at their professor's provoking ideas and the furiously scribbled note that captures that exciting moment of comprehension. Never can or will an Internet site provide the visceral excitement of learning, and alone will this crucial factor keep students attending class at the 62 universities affiliated with Wolf's Web site.

However far we have drifted from Weber's conception of American academics, StudentU.com has underhandedly transformed the sociologist's theory from a nostalgic ideal of the past to an urgency for the now. Once again, whether or not the students flock to a teacher will be "determined in large measure, larger than one would believe is possible, by purely external things: temperament and even the inflection of his voice."

Entertainment is not the answer. The effects of StudentU.com do not call for any fanfare by means of trivia games, celebrity appearances or gorgeous blondes handing out the day's lecture guidelines at the lecture hall's back doors. But professors need to provide for their students something more than what can be condensed into a few pages of notes. Inspiration, awe, frustration, outrage--whatever the reaction, there must be an emotional relationship between the professor and the student created by the experience in the lecture hall.

The new availability of lecture notes on the Internet creates a challenge for our professors to be more than machines that spew facts and theories at their students. Professors need to provide the incentive by means of leadership and interaction for students to once again enroll in classes and resurrect the respect Weber had observed.

Jordana R. Lewis '02, a Crimson editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House.