An attempt to write about the academic lecture must take into account that the supply of sources is vast and almost unmanageable. But this should not be regarded as a problem, because focusing on a more restricted context – be it national or limited to a specific institution – will simply be a way of reducing the sources to a more manageable size. And the lecture itself is, after all, rooted in a transnational academic culture.
1 B. Lindberg, Den akademiska läxan, p. 11. Although one might find some national or local peculiarities here, this material will also be relevant in a wider context. There is thus every reason to draw lessons from book history, where most of the analyses are concrete in the sense that they are anchored in an empirical source material. But before we move on to the Dano-Norwegian source material to be examined in this chapter, a word or two must be said about what characterises an academic lecture as such.
Although there are several types of academic lectures, what they all have in common is that they constitute a specific rhetorical situation where a qualified and certified lecturer speaks to an assembly of listeners who are students. The difference between them lies in how much the audience already knows and the consequences this will have for the presentation of the content itself. How does one, as a lecturer, approach students who already are in possession of a certain amount of knowledge compared to students who can and know very little? Questions of this kind, interesting as they might be for an attempt to understand the academic lecture in a historical perspective, do seem to have been passed over in silence prior to the mid-eighteenth century, however. And although lectures and the art of lecturing are of course treated in the rich humanistic literature, it is far more difficult to find the academic lecture discussed or reflected on in more bureaucratic prose like manuals, bureaucratic provisions or regulations.
It is striking how little attention the lecture attracted as a mode of communication. There was no room for it in the handbooks of classical rhetoric, since it did not fit into any of the three rhetorical genera, the deliberative, the judicial, and the demonstrative. There was more discussion of the disputation, i.e. the public defence of a thesis or dissertation, which was the most typical and conspicuous scholarly performance in the university tradition;
de arte disputandi, ‘how to discuss a thesis’, was a rather frequent topic in academic self-reflexion. Very little was said about the lecture.
2 B. Lindberg, ‘The Academic Lecture’, p. 40.Although the lecture was not perceived as a separate rhetorical genre, it is still not difficult to relate it to some of the basic concepts of the classical art of speech. In a rhetorical sense, the academic lecture will most often be designed in the so-called ‘plain style’ (genus subtile). This level of style does not aim to excite the listeners (flectere) but to teach them by arguing that so-and-so is the case and so-and-so is not: ‘this is true, this is not true’! In line with the usual division of the rhetorical situation as such into speaker (ethos), message (logos) and audience (pathos), the emphasis is on logos. It is the message, not the speaker, which ought to be the object of the audience’s attention. Finally, the classical rhetoric also contains a well-prepared doctrine of aptum, which includes reflections on what kind of audience the speaker is addressing and how he in a given case should and should not express himself.
The obvious lack of sources that could have shed light on the role and purpose of the lecture on the part of the institution need thus not constitute a serious obstacle. These questions will mainly be linked to ‘the professorial voice’ as part of the wider process of transmision of knowledge.
3 See W. Clark, ‘The Professorial Voice’, Science in Context 16 (2003), 43–57, and Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago, 2006). In any case, in order to understand not what the lecture was supposed to be, but what it really was, there are a multitude of sources available to us in the form of the notes that the students themselves put down in their lecture booklets, preserving the content of the lecture for a posterity in which the professorial voice has long since fallen silent.
Benefiting from the perspectives of book history mentioned above as well as supplied by the framework of university history, in what follows this chapter will turn its focus towards a limited period in the history of the academic lecture and a special type of lecture. The period is the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, and the lecture is the introductory course in philosophy often referred to as examen philosophicum. In a geographical sense, it will restrict itself to the University of Copenhagen and, after 1813, also the University of Christiania (Oslo). In order to illustrate how the academic lecture at these institutions was part of a transnational system, a small detour to Germany will however be necessary. The reason for choosing the introductory lecture is due to two factors, firstly that these lectures served as an introduction to what we might call academic literary citizenship and secondly because they bear the mark of being dictated by the lecturer. The primary sources that will be examined are all taken from the collection of manuscripts and student notes at the National Library of Norway in Oslo.