Leon Hu ’29
Executive Opinion Editor
It is easier than ever to live disconnected from the people around you. We still live in a post-COVID era dominated by a history of social isolation, social media, and the rise of AI technologies that can even simulate romantic relationships. In higher education, such phenomena have only increased social isolation. Specifically, AI has made it easier than ever to obviate the need to engage meaningfully with material and remain present in class, both physically and mentally. In lectures, when students even show up, it is not unusual to see multiple screens pulled up with a chatbot of their choice or social media feeds. If anything, it is rarer to see students on laptops engaged than peacefully disengaged with class material.
Yet such behavior is rarely possible in classes taught in a seminar format. The seminar format finds itself strangely well-suited to tackle these issues. Disengagement is difficult; professors tend to value active participation in discussions highly, and the knowledge required to succeed in assignments is near-impossible to gain without being present in such discussions. Similarly, measuring engagement is trivial: if a person is adding or clearly listening to the discussion at hand, they must be engaged. Consequently, seminar classes still generate exceptional engagement, especially when use of technology is limited.
So why are so many of our classes still taught as lectures?
Logistically, it obviously requires far more faculty and far more time spent by faculty to run a seminar versus a lecture. Our biggest lecture, BIOL-182, maxes at 84 students. Nonetheless, it is taught by just four professors and only requires one professor lecturing at once. Lectures can also be recycled from semester-to-semester, and the main work for faculty is to give rehearsed presentations, administer exams and answer questions — if they ever come up.
It would not be easy to find the faculty manpower to enact such a change. But it is also not easy to sit with the existential problem of AI that we all live with. Ultimately, we are a small, prestigious, liberal arts college with a 9:1 student faculty ratio. We are among the only schools who can even consider such a switch. Many of our classes are already in the 10-15 student range. In some departments, like English, almost every class is taught as a discussion-based seminar. In practice, many English ‘lectures’ effectively function as seminars.
Meanwhile, in the sciences, most majors eventually converge on seminars for upper-level courses when the content is elevated to the level of consuming primary sources. Here, the logic is that the science seminar — student-driven, discussion-based, where students independently consume information and use class to discuss content learned outside of class — is more adequate for students at a more advanced stage of study. Comparatively, the lecture is highly directive and teacher-driven. By definition, the professor lectures to the students (meaning a one-sided imparting of knowledge) with the tacit assumption that they, with their higher level of expertise, are justified in giving content to students in a non-reciprocal relationship.
This has always been a problematic assumption that contributes to the intense power hierarchy present in higher education. However, the issue is exacerbated in the age of AI: when students have constant access to a model with access to the entirety of human knowledge, what point is there to go to class if the only thing that is given is knowledge?
This does not render higher education obsolete. What it does, however, is raise concerns about how sustainable the current pedagogical norm that higher education assumes is. The philosophy of lectures simply imparting knowledge is no longer sufficient to justify hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education. However, development of the ability to think, intellectually-stimulating conversations and a community of students and faculty to talk to remains irreplaceable.
Higher education retains its monopoly on humans with the passion to share their knowledge and the will to have conversations about the difficult, the curious and the unknown. The seminar format weaponizes this monopoly by giving agency to the students via conversations with other people who are undeniably human. The professor, no longer the headmaster, utilizes the students’ existing knowledge on the subject — which they must obtain themselves — to spark discourse about the implications and significance of the content they learn. Importantly, it gives each student a chance to speak what they think about the subject, and it gives everybody else the chance to hear what a human thinks about the subject.
Knowledge can no longer be the sole end of a college education. Additionally, we must not perpetuate unnecessary power hierarchies that serve purposes that are now, unfortunately, replaceable. At the very least, as humans, we deserve more time to talk to each other. Why not do that in class?