Lecture hall

“ Thus if a fashionable lecturer announces that he will give a lecture to the working-classes with advice to them as to their behaviour, &c., no working-man by any chance is ever to be found among the audience, but the hall is filled with a distinguished company of rich and idle ladies and gentlemen, who understand just as little of the matter in hand as the lecturer, but who applaud him to the echo. ”

“ CHAPTER X LAKE MOLATA
How the girls did enjoy the rest of that afternoon! Connie and Rose showed them the classrooms and lecture rooms, told them little stories about the different teachers and recounted funny incidents of school life that made the girls bubble with laughter.
All the rooms were high-ceilinged, many-windowed and cheerful, but it was the lecture hall and gymnasium that the girls thought the most attractive of all. ”

“ The cost of the building we do not give, because it would be useful as showing how much, rather than how little, could be put into such an edifice. It contains, besides the museum proper, the floor-space of which amounts to about 10,000 square feet, a lecture-hall with a seating-capacity of about 1,200, a library and four large class-rooms, which, if the intentions of the founder are fully carried out, will be used for practical instruction in the fine arts. Desirable as all these rooms are in a building of the kind, the only one which seems to us absolutely necessary is the lecture-hall. ”

“ And the life is also earnest. There is no day without its hours of conscientious labour in the lecture hall, the library or study, whether this is in preparation for later teaching, for professional life or, as is more often the case, solely for the harmonious development of all the student’s faculties. ”

“ Thousands of most diverse personalities work out their life problems in this little city of lecture halls, laboratories, museums, libraries, banquet halls, and club buildings, which are scattered about the ancient elm-shaded yard. Each student has come, in the ardour and ambition of youth, to these halls where so many intellectual leaders have taught and so many great men of the outside world have spent their student years; and each one goes away once more into the world a better and stronger man. ”

“ The [170] truth is, people assemble in a lecture hall in a passive but expectant frame of mind. They are ready to be pleased or displeased. They are there like an instrument to be played upon by the orator. He may work his will with them. Without their sympathy his success will not be great, but the triumph of his art is to win their sympathy. ”

“ The site occupies 52 acres and overlooks a broad expanse of rolling country. The buildings are of grey stone in the Jacobean Gothic style, and consist of an administration and lecture hall, a science hall, a library containing in 1908 about 55,000 volumes mostly for special study, a gymnasium, a hospital and six halls of residence. The requirements for matriculation are high; students are required to choose their studies according to the "group system," which permits them to specialize in two or more subjects; and instruction is given largely by means of lectures. ”

“ The great hall, rather dimmer than ever because of the consciousness of daylight outside, is full of people, gathered in the afternoon not only from the city, but from all the environs within twenty miles, and they sit as attentive and absorbed as a class of students at an interesting lecture. ”

“ On arrival at the hall I saw no one except a bluff caretaker, who conducted me to a bare room, and brought me a chair. I asked him if there were no officials connected with the place whom I might expect to see before the lecture. He replied that there was no one there except himself and the audience.
“They’re in their seats all right,” he said; “and if you go on up those stairs when the clock strikes eight, you’ll find ’em before you. An’ a jolly good audience, too, they are.”
“But surely,” I demurred, “this isn’t usual. Do the lecturers never see anybody but the caretaker? ”

“ Many of them have a children's department, with trained library workers in charge of the specialized activities there conducted. In the larger buildings, lecture halls are an adjunct, where it is possible to provide university extension and similar lectures, and where women's study clubs, young men's debating societies and similar groups of persons find hospitable meeting places for carrying on their work. ”

“ Attached 85to the Hall of Liberty are large lecture-rooms, studying-rooms, and reading-rooms, and in connection with these a monster library. Outside the building are the stables, one of the wonders of London, the grooms being entirely composed of girls and women; and clustering round the mother structure like a miniature town, are the pretty cottages and dwellings of the immense staff of instructors, teachers, and lecturers connected with the institution. It is a wonderful structure, and its erection is a triumph, the magnitude of which can hardly be measured, for Hector D’Estrange. ”

“ If you would enter one of the old buildings there is naught to hinder. Go into one of the lecture-halls which chances at the moment to be unoccupied, and you will see an array of crude old benches for seats that look as if they might have been placed there at the very inaugural of the institution. The boards that serve for desks, if you scan them closer, you will find scarred all over with the marks of knives, showing how some hundreds of successive classes of listeners have whiled away the weary lecture-hours. Not a square inch can you find of the entire desk surface that is un-scarred. ”

“ Moreover, besides ordinary and regular courses of lectures, there must be lecture halls where, at appointed hours, every enterprising, knowledgeable person with something to say may speak to those who would like to listen. ”

“ Besides every Sunday I have a public lecture. The last month my lectures were in a small hall holding about 600. But 900 will come as a rule, 300 standing, and about 300 going off, not finding room. This week therefore I have a bigger hall, with a capacity of holding 1200 people. ”

“ In the main, however, the lecture halls of America are rather fine affairs. In the State of New York and on the other side of the Mississippi River I have found splendid auditoriums, acoustically perfect, well ventilated, and as nearly safe as human ingenuity can make them. The high [225] schools of New York and Massachusetts, and the flourishing educational institutions of the West, have set a pace which other communities would do well to follow: not so much for the sake of the itinerant platformist as for the "safety, honor, and welfare" of their own sons and daughters. ”

“ In one respect these particular lectures (afterwards published as his book on Pragmatism) stand alone in my recollection. An audience may easily be large the first time, but if there is a change it usually falls away more or less on the subsequent occasions. These lectures were announced for one of the larger lecture-halls. This was so crowded before the lecture began, some not being able to gain admittance, that the audience had to be asked to move to the large 'auditorium' I have mentioned. ”

“ It means a great school of debate, a college that grants no degrees. It gives me a sadness that is not akin to pain, to hear a young person designate a building as Lyceum Hall, using the word as if it were Grampian Hall or Hamilton Hall, having no glorious, clear conception of what the name of the hall signified to the early community. Tradesmen, farmers, professional men, themselves readers and thinkers, above all restless and eager disputants would meet night after night to discuss the unselfish problems of life. ”

“ You are then admitted into a large hall, accommodated with shelves for the convenience of the scholars, and as we pass through this and enter the school-room, we feel almost a child again. But we see at a glance that our dear old teacher does not occupy the desk, and it is a stranger's voice that strikes upon the ear. As we glance at the well-filled seats, we readily perceive there is not one of all the group, no, not one, that occupied those seats when we were scholars there. ”

“ The college is absolutely still, though one or two lights still burn in studious rooms, and peep through curtained chinks. What a beautiful place to live one's life in, a place which greets one with delicate associations, with venerable beauty, at every turn! The moonlight falls through the tall oriel of the Hall, and the armorial shields burn and glow with rich points of colour. ”

“ When they reach the door, each man must undergo the searching scrutiny of the door-keeper, usually disguised as an Indian, to avoid being recognized by a college officer, should one chance to be in the crowd, and no one is allowed to enter unless he is known.
"By the time the hour of the exercises has arrived, the hall is densely packed with undergraduates and professional students. The President, who is a non-appointment man, and probably the poorest scholar in the class, sits on a stage with his associate professors. ”

“ But it may be assumed that in every such audience there will be a nucleus of students, by which term we simply mean persons willing to do some work between one lecture and another. The lectures are delivered no oftener than once a week; for the idea is not that the lectures convey the actual instruction—great part of which is better obtained from books, but the office of the lecture is to throw into prominence the salient points of the study, and rouse the hearers to read, for themselves. ”

“ What is a University almost everywhere else? It announces little more, as respects the academic buildings, than that here is to be found the place of rendezvous—the exchange, as it were, or, under a different figure, the palæstra of the various parties connected with the prosecution of liberal studies. This is their "House of Call," their general place of muster and parade. Here it is that the professors and the students converge, with the certainty of meeting each other. Here, in short, are the lecture-rooms in all the faculties. ”

“ As in the case of classics and mathematics, the University teaching in history is largely supplemented by the colleges; but the Regius professor pleads for an additional reader and two lecturers. A central building with professors’ rooms and lecture-rooms and accommodation for the professorial library is urgently required. ”

“ There are who much applaud the lecture and the lecture-room, with its table full of glittering apparatus, glass and brass, and all the ingenious instruments by which nature, as we say, is put to the torture. Let such as please spend their hot uneasy hour in a crowd. We could never feed in a crowd; we detest benches and sitting in a row. ”

“ If a lecturer could always choose—which practically he never can do at all—he would prefer to lecture to a club of men and women in their club-room, or in the large drawing-room of a private house. He will then address a limited number of bright people who are at their best; he can talk as at a dinner-table and make his point easily; he can venture on an aside, or stop to tell an anecdote, and after an hour or so he will be as little fatigued as when he began. When the lecture is over he mixes with his audience and in a minute is a private individual. ”

“ The Fine Arts seminar was held in a huge room, almost a hall, in a kind of office building near the Square. It was advertised to begin at half-past seven, and pretty much every one was there on time,—all the sports of the Freshman and Sophomore classes, some Juniors, and even a few Seniors. It was what the society reporter refers to as "a large and fashionable gathering." It certainly was a mighty nice-looking crowd of fellows; clean, well dressed, and (to quote Berri) "much more intelligent in appearance than we actually are, or we should n't be here at all." ”

“ It is not perhaps quite clear whether a schoolmaster's house ranked as a hall, but, as soon as a scholar was equipped with an adequate stock of Latin to enter upon his Artist's career, he would naturally move to one of the halls tenanted by his equals in learning, thus making room for another and younger person more strictly in statu pupillari. ”

“ The party invited to lunch assembled first in the library of the college, a cool, gray hall, of very great length and height, with vast wall-spaces of rich-looking book-titles and statues of noble scholars set in the midst. Had the charming Fellows ever anything more disagreeable to do than to finger these precious volumes and then to stroll about together in the grassy courts, in learned comradeship, discussing their precious contents? Nothing, apparently, unless it were to give a lunch at Commemoration in the dining-hall of the college. ”

“ The office of the teacher has become inextricably mixed up with a totally alien office—university discipline. Attendance at lectures is the only means of recording a student's presence in the university, and success in the examination in lecture courses is the only basis for judging of his diligence. At the tolling of a bell the student leaves all other affairs to report at a certain place. In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, lectures were of necessity the main means of instruction. ”

“ Entering the hall they are ushered at once into the East Room, and having inspected it to their heart’s content, return by the same way they came, unless choosing to ascend to the waiting room on the second floor, and risk an opportunity of seeing the President. In this case, to a student of human nature a rare opportunity for study is presented. ”

“ Never in any public school have I seen such a splendidly equipped Domestic Science room as the one in the McKinley Park School. Its beautiful open, airy Assembly Hall with its hardwood floors and stage for private theatricals and other social affairs is the acme of modern refinement. ”