Educators and administrators alike argue that active learning yields superior results to the lecture. Wieman recently issued a fresh plea to educators to stop lecturing. For Wieman, who sees himself more as a kind of cognitive coach than the traditional “sage on the stage,” the college lecture is like bloodletting—an outdated practice that has long been in need of radical reform.

But is it the college lecture itself that’s the problem—or the lecturer?

Concerns about the lecture derive from anecdotal impressions as well as research data, including one meta analysis of 225 studies looking at the effectiveness of traditional lectures versus active learning in undergraduate STEM courses. That analysis indicated that lecturing increased failure rates by 55 percent; active learning—meaning teaching methods that are more interactive than traditional lectures—resulted in better grades and a 36 percent drop in class failure rates. High grades and low failure rates were most pronounced in small classes that relied on active teaching, supporting the theory that more students might receive STEM degrees if active learning took the place of traditional lecturing.

Still, although proponents of the movement to move away from the lecture cite data on its ineffectiveness, the debate has failed to take into account the fact that academics are rarely, if ever, formally trained in public speaking.

Many people think riveting lecturers are naturally gifted, but public-speaking skills can be, and are, taught. The art of rhetoric was practiced and taught for millennia, beginning in ancient Greece over 2,000 years ago; oratory skills were a social asset in antiquity, a way to persuade, influence, and participate in civic life. “For most of the Western tradition, oratory was not regarded as a separate subject, but as a part of rhetoric, which was about the artful design and presentation of something through language,” says James Engell, a professor of English and comparative literature at Harvard who taught a popular course on rhetoric for over a decade.

Early European universities taught rhetoric as one of the core liberal arts—the trivium—alongside grammar and logic, as did their American counterparts. John Quincy Adams was Harvard’s first Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory; for him, the persuasive individual was essential to democracy. By the 19th century, elocution lessons had become as standard as reading, writing, and arithmetic.

During the first half of the 20th century, the field of rhetoric and its like all but disappeared. The decline began at Harvard, as successive holders of the Boylston chair began to emphasize English literature over classical rhetoric, and other universities rapidly followed suit. Why the dramatic shift away from teaching people how to speak well? Engell explains that two phenomena contributed to its eventual decline: the invention of the telegraph and rise of the newspaper in the mid-19th century and the professionalization of disciplines at universities beginning around the 1880s. Newspapers became the chief medium through which information was transmitted, and increased specialization at universities meant people now concentrated specifically on rhetoric, poetics, or composition, whereas the earlier general assumption was that “this all fell under the purview of a large umbrella approach,” Engell says. “Specialization tended in some respects to reduce the importance of these divisions relative to a larger context, and when things are divided they tend to be easier to marginalize.”