Why We Need University Courses in Public Speaking

The endless, ongoing debates about admissions to elite universities have had many unfortunate effects. One is that they have focused attention so squarely on a small number of ultra-rich universities, rather than on the less well-endowed institutions that actually educate a large majority of American college students. Another is that they distract from the more important questions of what, and how, universities—all universities—should be teaching their students in the twenty-first century. Here is one suggestion. If there is a single mandatory course for undergraduates that American universities should be considering introducing in the year 2023, it is a course in public speaking.

Americans can be amazingly inarticulate. Politicians, business leaders, administrators, doctors and police officials all often do badly enough even when they have a script in front of them. Without a script, their speech can sometimes devolve into barely coherent word salad. I think this is one of the reasons that the literal incoherence of Donald Trump so often gets a pass in the media: the bar is already so low. Even members of professions that centrally involve verbal expression—journalists, lawyers, actors, professors—can sound surprisingly incoherent when put on the spot. I have had far too much experience listening to academic colleagues reading out conference papers in a stumbling monotone, staring straight down at the paper, or responding to questions with word salad. It is hard not to think: “you do this for a living!” Yes, speaking fluently and engagingly comes far more naturally to some people than to others—but that is precisely why we should provide training and practice to everyone, to help everyone come up to at least a minimal standard.

Many countries around the world give young people far more of this training than the United States does. When I attended the École Normale Supérieure in Paris many years ago, I was amazed that even the most socially incompetent students—the ones who could barely comb their hair or tuck their shirts into their pants—could still deliver word-perfect 45-minute oral presentations. When I asked a normalien friend about the apparent incongruity, he was puzzled. Of course they can do it, he replied. If they couldn’t, they wouldn’t be here in the first place. The entrance exam had an oral component, and competent oral expression was a sine qua non for admission. As Pierre Bourdieu long ago pointed out, this emphasis on verbal facility in elite French institutions is in no sense socially neutral. It provides yet another way for a supposedly egalitarian, meritocratic admissions system tacitly to favor children from the appropriate social backgrounds.

But we don’t have to make verbal facility a condition for university admission. Rather, we should train students in public speaking once they arrive at university. We might not be able to bring them up to the standard of the French normaliens, or of the British MPs who joust so impressively (sometimes) in the House of Commons, but just reaching a minimum standard of verbal fluency would be a big gain.

Public speaking has always been an important skill in many professions, but it is becoming even more so today. Technology, like it or not, has made it possible for people to be listening to whatever they choose at almost any moment of the day: while driving, exercising, doing physical labor, or just walking. The increasing importance of podcasts in recent years has put an additional premium on speaking ability, and unlike other internet fads, it seems like a permanent addition to the cultural landscape.

In fact, technology is increasingly blurring the line between writing and speech. We dictate to our phones, and have our phones read to us. Online meetings are automatically transcribed, and machine transcription, like machine translation, is becoming steadily more reliable. This change too favors those who can speak cogently and confidently off the cuff. I have an amazing colleague who can give a ten-minute impromptu comment on a paper without notes. If you recorded her and then transcribed the remarks, they would read like a piece of polished prose. This kind of ability will only become more important in coming years.

At the same time, in the age of smartphones and artificial intelligence, oral ability may well become more central to evaluation processes of all sorts. In universities, too many students cannot resist the temptation surreptitiously to look up information on their phones during exams, or to write papers with the help of Chat GTP. They are running their own drafts through AI to improve the prose. Where does the student or candidate end, and the bot begin? In an in-person interview or oral exam, it is much clearer just how much the student or candidate knows, and how well, and so I can easily imagine a shift towards this form of evaluation.

In fact, I’ve been trying to make the shift happen. Last spring, for the first time, I introduced an oral exam in my Princeton lecture course on the history of modern warfare. I gave the students a long list of terms, drawn from my lectures and the assigned reading, and told them they would be asked to identify, and explain the significance of a random five of these terms, for two minutes each. They could take a pass on up to three terms. I then scheduled them at fifteen-minute intervals, to give the TA’s and myself time to write up brief notes for each student. There were 50 students, so my two TA’s and I took 16 or 17 each, for a total of about four hours per examiner. The results were illuminating, to say the least. Some students talked effortlessly and knowledgeably and could have gone on for much longer than the required two minutes per term. A few stuttered and stumbled and clearly knew very little. Most fell somewhere in between. I told the students that I would not take eloquence into account in giving grades. But if they had taken a required public speaking course, then I would have put at least some emphasis on speaking ability. I already take their writing ability into account when grading their papers, since they have all taken a required expository writing course.

Obviously, it was much easier for me to introduce this sort of exam at Princeton, than it would be for colleagues who might have to grade a hundred students or more per semester without a TA. But this doesn’t change the point that oral exams and interviews seem likely to take on much greater importance in the age of AI, and we should be giving students better training for them.

Again, the ability to speak well in public comes far more naturally to some than to others, for all sorts of reasons, so some may think, like Bourdieu, that it goes against egalitarian principle to put too much emphasis on it. My point here is that society is going to be putting steadily more emphasis on it, whether we like it or not, and this is another reason, going forward, to provide formal training. It will help level the playing field. Another reason, of course, is that it will spare us all from some of the needless frustration and boredom we all experience when forced to listen to people who speak badly.