Adelaide University, one of the elite Group of Eight universities in Australia (and my alma mater in the 1970s pre-Woke era which increasingly seems as far away and long ago as the Precambrian) has officially decided to ditch the traditional lecture. The last rites will soon be read and that pedagogical tool will be no more on the North Terrace campus – another casualty of the university sector’s relentless ‘modernisation’ into technocratic, depersonalised, hyper-corporate contemporary tertiary education business enterprises.

Adelaide University’s staff portal confirms that ‘there will not be a learning activity type described as a lectures’ from 2026. In-person tutorials will remain, but the death of the lecture formalises the university’s long-held ambition to ‘deliver online education to more students than any other Australian university’.

The lecture is to be replaced by, in the dialect of Australia’s higher education bureaucracy, ‘rich asynchronous digital activities’. It will be a brave new lecture-less world of  ‘videos, podcasts, and modularised resources’, a pedagogical utopia of ‘self-paced and self-directed’ learning that will be so much better and more flexible, according to a university spokesperson, than ‘passive’ lectures (which are so last century along with the uni quad, ivy-covered walls, and caps-and-gowns).

This shiny new digital learning environment will, if the broader digitalisation of other levels of education is anything to go by, result in yet more of the same sterile and demotivating experiences that gained a foothold during the Covid ‘pandemic’. By the way, where were all the student radicals, and leftist academics, during the pseudoscience and quasi-fascistic authoritarianism of Covid ‘mitigation’ when they were really needed? Unquestioningly obeying or zealously enforcing ‘pandemic’ orders, that’s where!

As well as the downgrading of the learning experience itself, the diminishing need to attend a physical campus, with that venue’s concomitant opportunities for participation in organised clubs and societies, and in informal debate and discussion, will also see a degradation of the scope for extracurricular social development, personal growth, and intellectual exploration that is so formative during the typical university years.

Adelaide University’s authorities have brushed off the planned euthanasia of the lecture as merely continuing a ‘steady decline in attendance on campus, indicating that students prefer to access lecture content at a time suitable to them’. Liberation from the lecture, they say, with a sigh of self-satisfaction, is what students actually want but is this a convenient rationalisation that glosses over other reasons for the failing love affair with the on-campus university life?

The lecture format per se is, of course, not a guarantee of a rewarding educational experience. The forgettable lecturers are best forgotten over a cheap and nasty meal in a post-lecture debrief in the student refectory afterwards. The very good lecturer, on the other hand, one who is engaging, challenging, stimulating, motivating, entertaining and enlightening, on anything from Charles Dickens to differential calculus, will always leave a sterile digital ‘education’ in the academic shade.

The demise of the lecture will accelerate the galloping commodification of higher education as students become mere learning units bearing fees as the old teaching university transforms into an online education supermarket whilst lecturers join the gold rush to mine the richer pickings from government and private research grants.

Back in the day, we used to rail against universities as ‘degree factories’ (the graffiti above the toilet roll saying, ‘BA degrees – please take one!’ wasn’t that wide of the mark, after all) but the industrialisation and Taylorisation of massified tertiary education, crowned by the coming end of the lecture, makes that old lavatory quip much more appropriate now.

The extinction of the uni lecture is a sad headstone for an academic ‘industry’ that sees education as merely a money-making business activity. The lecture is not the only thing on its last legs but the university, and the salad days for many a student, is also looking decidedly wobbly.