Beard champions in-person teaching in farewell letter

MARY BEARD has backed the worth of “traditional face-to-face lectures” after teaching her last class at the University of Cambridge.

The renowned classicist expressed her support for pre-pandemic teaching methods as she bowed out of delivering lectures to undergraduates after more than 40 years.

She explained that if she had “become a halfway decent lecturer, it is because at a certain point, I realised that the lecture was about me talking to the audience in my way”.

The professor of classics and fellow of Newnham College insisted that “this isn’t carte blanche for solipsistic idiosyncrasy”, but said it does make a point about the importance of having the lecturer and students together in one room.

“It is saying that, if there is a case for traditional face-to-face lectures (and I think there is), it has to lie in the communication between lecturer and audience – and you can’t communicate very easily if one side is pretending to be someone else,” she wrote in the Times Literary Supplement.

Britain’s leading universities have been embroiled in a fierce row with ministers, students and parents in recent months about the failure of some to return to normal teaching since all Covid restrictions were ditched early this year.

Ministers and regulators are sending teams of inspectors to assess “blended learning” approaches on campuses and have threatened fines if digital learning “lets students down”.

Prof Beard, who rose to fame with her warm historical programmes on the BBC, first entered university teaching at King’s College London before moving to Cambridge in the 1970s.

She said the secret behind successful lectures was thinking about the impact upon the audience, rather than just the class’s content.

“The myth of people who walk into the lecture room and deliver a brilliant lecture from the top of their heads is just that: a myth,” she wrote.