Sean Carroll asks the question every scientist who attends a humanities talk asks: why are they reading a paper out loud?

Here's a simple way that academia could be greatly improved: humanities professors should stop reading their papers out loud, and start talking from notes like normal people. I will never understand why they do this in the first place. There is no reason why humanists, trained in the arts of rhetoric and communication, should be even worse at giving talks than scientists are. It's certainly not because it's easier to read a pre-written paper word for word; I tried it at an humanities conference once and found it to be utterly awkward and unnatural. I thought the Western tradition was supposed to valorize speech over writing. Does this go back to Plato's battle vs. the Sophists or something?

Yeah, what's up with that? I try to attend our campus faculty lecture series here, which is a mix of people from various disciplines, and that's the most striking difference. The humanities people put up a stack of papers on a lectern, stand behind it, and basically don't move much at all while reading aloud. The science people move the lectern out of the way, clearing the podium, and fire up the projector—then they talk informally while flipping through data and waving their arms a lot.

To put it in grossly unfair terms that favor my side of the divide, the humanities people sound formal and stilted and don't show their evidence and put me to sleep, while the scientists are dynamic and invite questions and interaction. In the Senior Seminar are students are required to give in their final year, we explicitly tell them they shouldn't read a prepared script, and we dock 'em points if they do. So why do you humanities people out there put yourselves in this formal straightjacket when you give talks?

Here's another weird academic difference, from Inside Higher Ed:

The other day I had my composition students in groups, ready to "peer edit," according to the latest pedagogy. Suddenly one student just got up, and started for the door. I glared at her. "Just going to the bathroom," she airly explained. I did not reply.

Wrong. I should have said or done something. We cannot have students wandering out of our classrooms at will. That way lies -- what? High school? Or do they ask permission from the teacher first in high school? Elementary school? This is where they are presumably taught to ask, and certainly where they must learn to discipline their bodily functions.

Most likely my student did not have to go to the bathroom. She just wanted to stroll a bit before bending to the task at hand. Another student might have been more aggressive, in order to demonstrate her dislike of the task, if not school itself. But in any case, what to do? If doing nothing seems wrong, shouting at the student to sit down does not seem right.

I have always thought of the bathroom as marking the moment of discipline in the college classroom. Any student mention of the bathroom, whether in good faith or not, becomes as impossible to deal with as it is inescapable. When students do anything in the classroom that merits the exercise of faculty discipline, professors are on their own. The easiest thing for everybody to do is to look the other way. There are few rules, unlike those in place for elementary, middle, and high school teachers.

There's more, but that had me gaping in disbelief. Why so much concern for enforcing the attention of his students? I consider my students to be adults, and if they have to leave during class, I'm going to trust that they are only doing what is necessary. As long as they aren't disruptive, I don't mind at all. He actually has it backwards, I think: grade school is where teachers are often anal retentive and police the behavior of students more closely, and require silly things like hall passes to use the bathroom. In college, we assume they are all big boys and girls. I thought.

It's also a rather snide article. He seems a bit dismissive of this "latest pedagogy" (peer editing is new?) and assumes that the student dislikes the classwork. I get the distinct impression that someone likes to keep his sphincter tightly puckered.

Am I just more laid back than most, or do other faculty avoid treating their classroom like an EST seminar?