Professor on the Air

BY, “THE LISTENER”

Here, on one end of the log, sits the professor. Yonder sits the student.

Or put it this way: here are 91,000 members of the faculties of 1700 colleges and universities. Each professor is filled with meaty information which he would like to share not only with his classroom but with society. Our society consists of 130,000,000 souls. Handy to the professor are 920-odd radio stations which will convey his words down the log to most of those 130,000,000 souls. Of 34,000,000 families in the United States, some 31,000,000 own radios — own, in fact, over 56,000,000 receiving sets in working order. Some 75,000,000 Americans over twelve years old listen to the radio some part of every day. The average receiver is tuned in about three hours a day.

But society does not listen much to the professor. And the professor is pretty cross about this.

Why is the professor cross?

The professor is cross because most people don’t want to hear him profess.

Educational programs are comparatively dull. At their dullest they are actively repellent. The high dullness content cannot be charged to the radio station or network which exposes the professor to the air, for it is the practice of the network not only to give the professor free time but to attempt to guide him in making his utterance more interesting. The station and the network feel sad that the utterance, even at its best, attracts so small an audience, because they know there is an untapped treasure of valuable information in the colleges. The stations would prefer to spread this information to massive fractions of the public, as part of their mandate of public service. But they are stumped because they cannot make the professor catch up with radio.

Some educational programs have succeeded in reaching measurable audiences. A half-hour educational program which attains a “rating" of 5 per cent of the 31,000,000 radio homes is the rare exception. A million and a half listeners is an awesome audience to a professor whose classroom capacity rarely exceeds a thousand students, and the fact that 1,500,000 people will listen to an educational program is adequate evidence of the hunger for orderly and authoritative information. But a 5 rating is considerably leaner than the median evening halfhour rating of 13 or 14. And the total of educational programs measured alongside the total of other types of program is minute.

At one time or another you’ve heard them all. If you have not heard them all with reasonable frequency, you must not do as so many disgruntled professors do — carp before listening. But if you are familiar with the less unpopular educational programs, you have observed the cardinal reason why, at their best, they are not listened to more. You have heard a fairly “successful" program like the “University of Chicago Round Table" skid right off the highway into abysmal dullness. You have listened to Lyman Bryson interrogating an academic guest on " Invitation to Learning" or “The People’s Platform” and have heard the program suddenly fall apart. So you know the cardinal reason.

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The cardinal reason is that the professor has not generally waked up to the fact that radio, whatever else it may be, is a medium of vocal communication to the brain by way of the human ear. To reach the brain, the sounds that issue from his mouth into the microphone should not be hard to hear. The harder they are to hear, the sooner more and more people will say (subconsciously) “Ouch" and stop listening, or turn to an easier sound.

We shall have more about radio from time to time from THE LISTENER, behind whose modest pseudonym is a well-known authority in that field.

The professor is wholly conditioned to facing a classroom. He has absolute police power over the boys and girls, as to their manners and their marks. They will face him for fifty-seven minutes, give him a reasonable facsimile of attention, or else. He will do his conscientious best to make his words reasonably intelligible. If he is an extrovert he may ad lib his material or embellish his demonstrations with harmless antics. If he is a proud stylist, who hopes to put his lectures into a book to win him a promotion, he may organize his material so that it really holds his audience, and sometimes even moves it. By and large, however, he takes partial shelter under his disciplinary power and his visual presence. (It might be interesting to see what would happen to the marks of a class taught for a term in a classroom by remote control, the professor professing unseen from his own study, the class receiving gospel via the loud speaker.)

When the professor takes the air he doesn’t realize that he has no police power over the radio audience, and that people don’t like to be talked down to, hollered at, or cooed to. People have a deadly accurate way of sizing up the person behind the voice. If it is sincere and clear, they will give you generous latitude in dialect, timing, timbre, and other mannerisms. Some notable radio commentators are festooned with mannerisms, without loss of sincerity: others stand convicted of insincerity through mannerisms alone.

To minor solecisms people are generally tolerant; per contra, fancy talk makes them sick. They would just as soon not have a professor indulge in too many aggressive mispronunciations, but they will not forgive extremes of preciosity, mock-gentility, or podium-poisoning. They despise phony attempts to sound patronizing, jolly, comradely, and jocular. The radio audience stands humble before knowledge. It is eager in its curiosity. It is selfinterested in acquiring (free) new ideas which might be applied to its personal improvement. But the radio audience is death on dull voices.

The classroom professor has not had to rely on his voice alone to dominate. A good voice never yet handicapped a good or bad teacher, but too few have discovered that, to any teacher, a reasonable voice is as essential equipment as a rifle to a soldier. This is probably because training in reading aloud long since fell into disuse in the schools. Believe it or not, even professors are first trained in primary and secondary schools. A candidate for a teacher’s job, if he can pass an “oral” without tangling too violently with the spoken tongue, “gets by" so far as voice is concerned, and goes to work teaching the young. The very manner of his teaching, the young accept as standard because they know no better. Thus out of our schools has come a solid mass of population which is content to accept the slovenly educational voice as a necessary evil-and to avoid it whenever convenient.

It would be impolite not to note exceptions to support the contention. Great teachers there have been who spoke with voices of angels. My pet exception is a little man in a tawny and heavilytimbered tweed suit who would come grumbling into a classroom, fidget at his table with books and papers, pause, sweep the room with a glance, open his mouth and read-from a book. An old book. A “dull" book, as most thought it. He would read to a roomful of men as if they were children in bed. He read at random. A letter he had received. A poem. A whimsical sketch. Then a passage from, of all things, the Bible, which suddenly panic to life, and you could have heard a sin drop.

Out of this little man came a magnetic voice that simply “irised out” everything in the room except what that voice was saying. Charles Townsend Copeland was born for radio. He has not broadcast much, nor done his best reading on the air. But he serves our point, for in his classroom teaching the vocal vitality he brought to the printed word built up about him, over the years, the largest army of students who remember any single American teacher-leader.

If so far we have indicated that the professors ought to brush upon their “elocution, prowl their bathrooms crying “mi-mi-mi-mi,” or reciting passages from the Master Voice beginning “My friends . . . ,” let us correct ourselves. The quickest way to cripple radio education would be a flight to canned mannerism. (Look at what the so-called “ holy tone” has done to dilute the divine authority of the pulpit.)

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The soundest start towards improving the rating of educational radio (which means simply adding new audience) is to start from the base-by improving the average professorial delivery. Singers who make their living by diverting or inspiring the public take vocal training as a matter of course. Fiddlers pay out large sums and long hours of penal practice to learn how to draw the bow across the strings. To divert or inspire the public by radio, is it less logical to assume that the professor should take pains to know how to draw the bow of thought nicely across the strings of the larynx? It might be possible fora leader of men to lead them in a whisper laced with hiccups; and for all I know, Napoleon stammered; and I do recall that Theodore Roosevelt spoke like an anguished owl-but after all, that is the hard way. Education never yet elected the easy way.

There is radio time for all who will hold an audience. The treasure of information in the universities and colleges is for the most part untapped by society, unapplied to its current salvation. Education, moreover, has not begun to tap the positive power of the public’s eagerness to understand and to apply the lessons the professors are best qualified to teach.

The challenge put by the advent of radio to mass education is not one which can be dodged much longer. In a democracy you cannot force education down the throats of the people. You cannot really educate, which means “leading out of (darkness) into (light),” without holding an audience,can you? On the radio, or anywhere else.

After all, the student stayed on the other end of that log. Maybe he didn’t dare tune out.