What I’ve Learned From Recorded Lectures

In graduate school, I specialized in 19th-century American literature, expecting that, as a faculty member, I would probably teach a survey course and seminars in autobiography, romanticism, the history of the book, and the poet Walt Whitman. I thought I might also be asked to teach composition.

Seven years later -- as a tenured professor at a medium-sized, liberal-arts college -- I figure I can teach just about anything in the humanities at an introductory level from the Renaissance to the present, and, with some extra notice, I just might be able to stretch that chronology back to the Caves of Lascaux or take my students on an archaeological tour of Jerusalem.

Out of the 50 or so courses I have taught in my current position, no more than a third have been related to the fields for which I trained in graduate school and on which all of my scholarly publications have focused.

I am not complaining. I am grateful for the experience, which is probably typical for professors who are not employed by research universities. In many respects, teaching outside my field -- mostly general-literature courses and surveys of Western civilization -- has refined and deepened the education I only half received as an undergraduate.

My transformation from a specialist into a generalist has not been easy. Under the pressure of teaching 12 credits a semester -- sometimes a dozen different topics a week -- I have had to take a few short-cuts.

More than a few times, particularly when I am just getting started in a new course, my life as a teacher has been saved by recorded lectures. If you haven’t received one of those catalogs, sellers such as the Teaching Company or Recorded Books, along with many smaller companies, offer recordings of lectures similar to the kind you might find at a research university on any given day.

The largest catalog -- approaching 300 titles -- is offered by the Teaching Company, which was founded in 1990 by Thomas M. Rollins. Apparently, when he was a student at Harvard Law School, Rollins crammed for an exam on the federal rules of evidence by watching a 10-hour series of videotaped lectures. The experience stuck with him, and Rollins eventually realized there was a void in the market for college-level lectures on serious subjects.

According to the Teaching Company’s Web site, its lecturers are chosen on the basis of “teaching awards, published evaluations of professors, newspaper write-ups of the best teachers on campus, and other sources.” Selected professors are invited to give a sample lecture, which is then reviewed by the company’s regular customers. The most favored professors are brought to a special studio near Washington, where their lecture series is recorded and filmed.

It all sounds rather exciting, like the academic equivalent of being discovered in a coffee shop by a Hollywood casting director.

Most of the lecturers are not names I would recognize without some research -- and I would not say that they reflect the full range of viewpoints in academe -- but nearly all of the recordings I have purchased or rented from various companies have been helpful to me as I was trying to get a handle on new material.

For example, in his recorded lecture series, “The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self” (2003), Leo Damrosch expounds on the importance of the philosophers Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Denis Diderot in the development of how we think of ourselves now. Partly owing to Damrosch’s knowledge and enthusiasm -- his affable way of conveying information and complex theories while telling a number of interlocking stories -- my own lectures on the European Enlightenment have become a source of considerable pleasure (for me at least), rather than merely an obligation. I even bought a facsimile edition of Diderot’s Encyclopedie to read and share with my students.

I don’t think I would have acquired that interest so readily from a stack of books and the need to teach their contents a few days later.

Even though most recorded lectures are completely respectable examples of scholarship and teaching, I suspect that many famous professors would be reluctant to have their lectures recorded, even if many people would like to hear them. Academics often seem anxious about any activity that might reach a popular audience or about affiliating with a profit-oriented business (something alien to academic culture, as we all know).

Creating a recorded lecture is not likely to contribute much to your professional advancement within academe. A recorded lecture is not the place to unveil your latest findings or to engage in the martial arts of scholarly infighting. No one gets tenure for recording a lecture series, and the professional societies offer no awards for that kind of service.

On the other hand, recorded lectures can give professors a much wider audience for their subject, and that surely benefits all of us. Even as more and more people find higher education financially out of reach, or impractical to continue beyond early adulthood, recorded lectures -- combined with the increasing availability of online lecture content and Web resources like the Wikipedia and countless blogs -- are bringing on the Golden Age of the autodidact. I can’t help thinking that Diderot would approve, and I wish academe would do more to encourage such activities.

Why is it that the most exciting, innovative, and useful activities available to professors in the humanities are precisely the ones that confer no merit?

Recorded lectures also could help defuse some of the hostility aimed at academics these days. Nearly every lecturer I have listened to via recording is balanced, learned, and reluctant to make pronouncements outside of his or her scholarly field. I hear those lecturers, and I think: These are people who deserve public support and the protections of tenure.

For all my enthusiasm, I do have a few minor gripes with some of these products. For example, recorded lectures tend to incorporate rather cheesy bumper music. One company’s tapes all begin with Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2. The music reminds me of the opening credits of Masterpiece Theatre, and I suppose it is meant to offer the promise of an elite education to a presumptively middlebrow audience. But the lecturers need no fanfare to precede them, as if they were pretending to be the archbishop of Canterbury.

I am grateful that I have never heard a lecture with a laugh track, although sometimes recorded lectures include obviously canned applause. I wonder what a live classroom would be like with similar audio accompaniment.

Another quibble is that these companies sometimes have peculiar pricing systems in which some courses are considerably more expensive than others, even though most courses go on sale at least once a year at substantial discounts. Unless you really need a particular title -- to help you prepare, as I once had to, an unexpected plenary lecture on Paradise Lost (thank you, Seth Lerer of Stanford) -- it is best to wait for the recording to go on sale and buy in anticipation of future needs and interests.

Sometimes a lecture for which you have waited can unexpectedly go “out of print.” Fortunately, there is an active secondhand market for recorded lectures on eBay. People usually do not bid up to the original retail price, but some titles are particularly sought after, such as Donald Pease’s lectures on American literature, which I lost to another bidder more than a year ago and still regret.

In addition to the recordings, most lectures come with substantial booklets that outline the lectures and provide suggestions for further reading. I can easily see doctoral candidates using those outlines to help construct the mental cathedrals they need for their comprehensive examinations. I recall using a few early editions for that purpose, and the outlines have been helpful to me over the years when first designing units for my courses.

There is something a little shameful, perhaps, about a professor using a commercial product to develop course material. My real-life colleagues were often generous with their time and lecture notes, but there was much more to be learned than I could reasonably ask other busy faculty members to teach me on short notice. Where could I get a 50-minute distillation of, say, the causes of the Reformation, to prepare for next week’s classes? Where could I find some colorful anecdotes and telling excerpts from the most relevant primary texts?

I could read widely and deeply if I had years to prepare, but, as a new specialist turned generalist, I got the material I needed in a hurry from recorded lectures.

I no longer need those recordings to study for exams or prepare my courses, but much of what I learned from them has remained useful to me, even if their contents have since become layered with years of reading and research on subjects about which I once had no professional training.

Nevertheless, a steady stream of recordings has continued to enrich my intellectual life. They are still filling gaps in my education, cultivating new scholarly interests, and augmenting and challenging what I already know. But what I continue to learn, most of all, is the artfulness and efficacy of the lecture as an educational tool.