The Great Videos of the Western World : Education: Academia’s best lecturers are being captured on videotape. The entrepreneur responsible learned the value of his idea firsthand.
Go ahead and smack your forehead with your palm. You’re going to wish you’d thought of this.
Videotape University: passionate, erudite, living-legend lecturers doing their greatest hits, getting down to academics in marathon shows recorded live before full houses of middle-aged, insight-thirsty, lifelong learners.
There’s Yale’s Richard Gerrig, associate professor of psychology, making you laugh and appreciate “fundamental attribution error.” This guy’s New Haven class seats 500, but one semester 1,500 students showed up. Enough said?
There’s Wesleyan’s Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, professor of classics, bringing the Archaic Age of ancient Greece to vivid life with poetry and slides.
Think of all the folks who wish they had college to do over now that they’re old enough to appreciate it. Folks whose kids could benefit from top teachers.
Don’t feel so bad. Tom Rollins, lawyer turned video entrepreneur, might not have thought of this either if he hadn’t messed up years ago at Harvard Law.
He’d skipped “Federal Rules of Evidence” all semester. With finals looming, he grabbed the chance to watch 10 hours of videotaped lectures on the subject by an esteemed Cornell law professor, the late Irving Younger.
“I was dreading it,” he recalls. Instead, “I laughed and cried. I learned how radar won World War II, what dying men say to their wives. This guy taught the socks off what has got to be one of the most boring subjects thought up by the mind of man.”
Rollins aced that final, and the power of the right lecturer on video stuck with him through the years. In 1989, he started the Teaching Co., based in Arlington, Va., to tape and market “great college course lectures.”
To find them, Rollins chose the country’s top 40 colleges. Then he either studied student teacher-evaluation guidebooks or asked students “who’s hot and who’s not.”
At Wesleyan in Middletown, Conn., for example, the evaluation guide summed up student reaction to Szegedy-Maszak’s classes on Greece: “Superlative. Superlative. Superlative,” Rollins reports.
Mostly, professors were picked ahead of subject matter.
“It’s not like we went, ‘Gee, what undergrad courses look like something on the best-seller list.’ Forget that, we’re selling something real here.”
What he’s selling is nothing less than the pedagogue as powerhouse, the academic as performance artist. “It’s a perverse world in which we imprint . . . people who can do tomahawk slam-dunks in the common parlance of our lives but in which we cannot name five of our hundred best teachers.”
The very first “SuperStar teachers” immortalized on VHS ( and audio tapes too) for the company’s fledgling 15-course catalogue were from Connecticut--Gerrig and Szegedy-Maszak.
On a sleety March weekend last year, the two took their sharply contrasting styles to a podium at Georgetown University.
(A Smithsonian adult-learning program provided the audience--crucial to capturing these luminous lecturers live in concert--and ticket sales helped defray production costs.)
Gerrig, 31, is the more obviously theatrical of the two.
In the taped lecture on social psychology, Gerrig displays a comedian’s exuberance and timing. His giddily clasped hands explode into broad gestures as if he were unfurling the socio-psychic fabric with each point.
Gerrig explains “fundamental attribution error” first in terms of experimental findings: People tend to mistakenly attribute occurrences to individual behavior, when they are really caused by the situation.
He quickly follows up with an illustrative comic story: He selected a song on the jukebox at Naples Pizza in New Haven. When the wrong song--a truly embarrassing number--came on because of a malfunction in “the jukebox from ‘The Twilight Zone,’ ” Gerrig says he had to flee the horrified looks of fellow patrons who assumed he had chosen the offending tune.
“The point of telling the story about the jukebox is so that everyone watching the tapes can say, ‘Yeah, I recognize that situation,’ ” he says. “Psychology is just supposed to be relevant.”
As he puts it on video: “You kind of need to be able to explain behavior to kind of figure out what the rest of your life is going to be like.”
Gerrig’s funky delivery is helped by the fact that many social-psychological experiments sound like “Candid Camera” scripts.
Take a key study of “bystander intervention.” Subjects are asked to fill out a questionnaire in a room that then fills with smoke. Whether they report the blinding conditions is strongly tied to whether there are other people in the room and how those others act.
Gerrig argues that such knowledge--that people in experiments wait for others to act if the situation is unclear--could save someone in an emergency.
“ ‘You! I need your help! Don’t be pluralistically ignorant!’ ” he cries, mixing pantomime with jargon.
Both Gerrig and Szegedy-Maszak presented mini-versions of semester-long courses in a single weekend, a feat that took four straight 45-minute lectures each day.
Gerrig attributed his stamina to Nautilus workouts and especially to a kind of messianic fervor that kicks in while imparting psychological truths.
It also helped that he got a five-minute break every hour by saying, “I can’t answer any more questions. My makeup person has to fix me.”
He notes, “These are not normal parts of the academic experience.”
By stylistic contrast, the dark-bearded Szegedy-Maszak, 42, maintains a steady eloquence that belies pre-lecture bouts of “aerobic fretting.”
It also belies a somewhat subversive approach toward the popular stereotypes of classical Greece as “guys wearing cloaks talking about deep topics.”
Szegedy-Maszak hopes that video viewers “might find preconceptions jiggled a little,” shifted away from either “monotonous” reverence or from thinking that the ancients were “just like us.”
In one tape’s lecture on the Archaic Age (776 to 500 BC), he cites the lack of modern human rights (only free adult males were considered fully human) and says that the pure white statues one associates with the classical purity were actually brightly colored (the colors wore off through the ages).
But he also cites examples of art and human behavior that vividly bridge the millennial gap.
He quotes the lyric poetry of Hipponax, who sounds like the beat brawler Charles Bukowski: “Somebody hold my cloak, I’m going to punch Boupalos in the eye. I can hit with both hands and I never miss.”
Knowledge of antiquity doesn’t directly yield modern solutions, he concedes. But it puts our culture in context--from Parthenon-like architectural touches to key concepts of politics and community.
As for his newfound commercial status, he quips: “Maybe someday, like Dylan, there will be Szegedy-Maszak bootleg (tapes) out there.”
