In a column published in Thursday’s Daily, columnist Anthony Bader expresses his frustrations with the lecture format of many, if not most, classes at many, if not most, universities. While criticism of the lecture is valid at some level, his manner of doing so is frightfully self-indulgent. I hope he meant to be satirical in this piece but, since I fear he did not, I feel compelled to note the following points.

Many of his arguments rest on the “inefficiency” of lectures, which comes from the fact that students may be disengaged, uninterested or incapable of keeping up and taking lots of notes. That inefficiency, he seems to indicate, is not a student’s fault. Yet, however uninspiring a professor’s lecture may be (I think of a “Bueller…Bueller…Bueller” tone of voice), attending college is an act of free will that we all make. Matriculation, along with enrollment in specific classes, is a conscious decision. If a student does not like one, he or she should switch sections, take another class or buck up and be an adult.

In other words, he or she should appreciate the fact that college is supposed to be harder than high school (your freshman year is not the 13th grade), that it is fast paced and demanding and that it — like anything worth having — carries an expensive cost.

Unfortunately, it seems that the exhortations of the first president of Iowa State, Adonijah Welch, at his inauguration in 1869, have been lost: “The gaining of disciplined ability depends more on the teacher who inculcates the method and mode of acquiring, than upon the science that supplies the facts to be acquired, and farm more on the pupil than on either.” The fact that something is boring is no excuse for dissatisfaction with it. Read that chapter every night and keep up with your note taking, and you may very well find the joy in the subject matter. And if you’re only in the class for the sake of a general education requirement, approach it with the open mind that is supposed to be the hallmark of a university and academe, and you might begin to get something out of something other than your program of job training – a purpose which, after all, is the whole point of “general education.”

Further, to discard lectures wholesale might be a bad idea. The same way that people use different kinds of boats for different purposes – you wouldn’t go fishing in an oil tanker, would you? – different class formats lend themselves to different purposes. To redeem the reputation of lectures a little bit, it’s worth noting that they provide the information necessary to understand readings that might be discussed as well as a cohesive body of knowledge that everyone in some field ought to know. Although such a role can allow students to slack off if they wish and get by with minimal effort, the fact that many students do so allows others to stand out by virtue of their dedication, interest and success.

If, however, universities do decide to abjure the lecture format, extensive new resources will have to come from somewhere. The smaller class sizes that more effectively facilitate discussion than a lecture cost money; where two, three, or four hundred might be packed into a lecture hall, discussion sections are most effective with around 25 students. Personally, I think seminar-style classes of 15 would be ideal. The money for those classes must come from state appropriations, in the case of a state university like Iowa State, or from increased tuition.

In the end, Bader’s column comes down to his remark that he often finds himself “sitting in class wondering why I’m going thousands of dollars in debt for the privilege of sitting in a classroom and not only having a professor lecture at me for an hour, but also assign a chapter of reading every class.” But that’s just the point: attending college is a privilege, not a right. Our presence here is (or should be, for the most part) based on our merits. I imagine that millions of people around the world who live in countries without universities or with suppressed universities, or who cannot afford the cost of attendance, or who cannot borrow enough money to cover expenses yearn to have it as bad as Mr. Bader.