Why 99% of University Lectures Fail
“I want to be very clear,” a lecturer once said, “that providing PowerPoint slides is a service. It is something a professor does not have to do.”
I heard this statement a while ago, and it made me angry for days, although at the time I couldn’t articulate why. Today, with more calm and far more clarity, I can finally explain why an educator should never say — or even think — something like this.
However, before I begin with criticism, I need to clarify something I see now and didn’t see then. I genuinely appreciate when humans do not contort themselves into being liked or admired. Life has taught me that the ability to say something publicly, knowing it will irritate many, is a rare quality — a kind of moral backbone that far fewer people possess than we like to imagine. And if I had understood this at the time, if I had paused long enough to recognise that this person’s statement came from intellectual honesty rather than arrogance, I’m sure I would have been far less annoyed. I would have seen the courage instead of the provocation, the integrity instead of the irritation.
And yet, the irritation about the statement still remains, and I want to explain why. Let me start with the easiest part: This has nothing to do with the format someone uses for teaching. I remain absolutely convinced that excellent teaching can be performed without a single computer in the room. As a student, I rarely rely on PowerPoint slides myself; I depend on the lecture, on the spoken argument, on the intellectual movement of the hour, and I prefer to craft my own string of words out of what I hear. In that sense, I essentially agree with the statement on the purely technical level: Slides are not necessary, and no one should feel guilty for choosing not to provide them.
But the question of format is not the real issue here. The real issue lies elsewhere — in the attitude behind the statement, in the idea that offering something to students is somehow an optional courtesy rather than an inherent part of the job. And that is where the problem begins.
What I’ve noticed, after ten years of studying, is that many lecturers begin by complaining long before they ask themselves a basic pedagogical question: Am I truly giving something to the students — something useful, something they will still be able to use twenty years from now? From my point of observation, the answer, in most cases, is a clear and convincing no. The vast majority of educators are not putting in the effort required to make a student value what they are offering. They assume that the mere act of speaking in front of a room constitutes teaching, that the transfer of information is enough, that the responsibility ends with the lecture’s final slide or final sentence.
And yet, because there is that tiny percentage of people who do put in the effort, I know how transformative great teaching can be — how a single course, delivered with intention and courage, can alter the way a person thinks for the rest of their life. A few people — very few — have done that for me. They shifted the architecture of my mind, rearranged the way I understand the world, and left behind ideas that continue to shape me years later. Their lectures were not performances but turning points. They taught in a way that made knowledge feel alive, urgent, and personal, and because of them, I know that real teaching is not about information at all; it is about awakening. And once a person has been awakened by someone like that, they never return to who they were before.
Does that mean that every student will appreciate a fantastic delivery of content? No, of course not. Many students will still be lazy, and some will be genuinely prevented from attending the lecture and will rely on the notes other people made. That is simply part of the ecology of studying. But this reality does not diminish the value of excellent teaching. The point of teaching well is not to guarantee universal appreciation — that is impossible — but to ensure that those who are ready, willing, or able to receive something meaningful actually have something worth receiving.
When teaching is done well, even the students who miss the lecture or skim the notes will sense that something valuable happened — something they might return to later, something that could matter once life gives them the space to care. That is the quiet, long‑range power of the best pedagogy: It plants seeds even in the minds that are not ready to bloom.
And some of us know this power in its most urgent form. Some of us are forced to learn the hardest way that the greatest liberation a person can achieve is learning how to use their own mind. To think independently. To question authority. To refuse the narratives imposed on them — not out of rebellion for its own sake, not out of a childish desire to contradict, but out of a deeper need to distinguish between what is true and what is false. Because that, in my view, is the hardest task of all: to recognise truth even when the speaker is uncertain, and to recognise lies even when they arrive wrapped in care. It is a skill that dictatorships — including domestic ones — work tirelessly to suppress, because a person who can tell truth from falsehood cannot be controlled. And it is the skill that teaching, at its best, can restore.
To return to the lecturer who framed PowerPoint as a “service,” I have to say: no. Absolutely not. No aspect of teaching should ever be understood as a service, and if you teach well, whether or not you use slides is irrelevant — a detail, not a foundation.
Given the path my life has taken, I cannot see education as an ideal or an accessory; I see it as a survival skill. It is the difference between being trapped and being able to live. Teaching, in my view, is not a task but an act of profound human responsibility. It is the moment when one person’s knowledge becomes another person’s possibility. To reduce that to a “service” is to misunderstand the very nature of the profession — to mistake the vessel for the offering, and the performance for the transformation.
