Quote: A professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either

[Garson O'Toole]

Dan: Fantastic! Thanks for locating that valuable passage. It is
possible that Harry Lloyd Miller condensed the passage you have posted
that was written by Edwin Emery Slosson into the saying attributed to
"Slosson" in 1927. Alternatively, Slosson may have analyzed the ritual
of the lecture on another occasion and composed a currently unknown
passage that is closer to the 1927 saying.

Offlist and independently Steven Goranson emailed me that Edwin Emery
Slosson was a plausible source for the quote, and he pointed to a
bibliography of the editor-scientist for further research.

Before posting to the list I saw Edwin Emery Slosson's entry in
Wikipedia. He was a prominent "Slosson" who wrote about University
life in the appropriate time-frame, but I did not find the passage
that Dan located.

Your help is greatly appreciated.
Garson

On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 12:58 PM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Quote: A professor's lecture notes go straight to the
>               students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of
>               either
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> That tells us that Edwin Emery Slosson is supposed to have said it.
>
> Here's what he wrote in his book Great American Universities from 1910:
>
> As it is, the professors give too many lectures and the
> students listen to too many. Or pretend to; really they
> do not listen, however attentive and orderly they may be.
> The bell rings and a troop of tired-looking boys, followed
> perhaps by a larger number of meek-eyed girls, file into
> the classroom, sit down, remove the expressions from their
> faces, open their notebooks on the broad chair arms, and
> receive. It is about as inspiring an audience as a roomful
> of phonographs holding up their brass trumpets. They
> reproduce the lecture in recitations like the phonograph,
> mechanically and faithfully, but with the tempo and timbre
> so changed that the speaker would like to disown his re-
> marks if he could. The instructor tries to provoke them
> into a semblance of life by extravagant and absurd state-
> ments, by insults, by dazzling paradoxes, by extraneous
> jokes. No use; they just take it down. If he says that
> " William the Norman conquered England in 1066," or
> " William the German conquered England in 1920," it is
> all the same to them. They take it down. The secret is
> that they have, without knowing anything about physio-
> logical psychology, devised an automatic cut-off which goes
> into operation as they open their notebooks and short-
> circuits the train of thought from the ear directly to the
> hand, without its having to pass through the pineal gland
> or wherever the soul may be at the time residing and hold-
> ing court.
>
> DanG

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