Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

The Professor's Lecture Notes Go Straight to the Students' Lecture Notes

Not Mark Twain — first credited to Edwin E. Slosson Edwin E. Slosson 1865–1929 · American chemist, editor and popular science writer
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Mark Twain died in 1910, and Quote Investigator ↗ found “no substantive evidence” connecting the saying to him — the earliest instance it could locate is from 1927, seventeen years after his death. That instance is in Harry Lloyd Miller’s Creative Learning and Teaching, where Miller credits it to “Slosson” — probably Edwin E. Slosson, whose 1910 book Great American Universities makes the same complaint at length. QI is careful to add that no version in Slosson’s own writing has been found, so even his authorship of the polished quip is credited rather than proven.

Last verified 27 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“The Professor's Lecture Notes Go Straight to the Students' Lecture Notes” not Mark Twain, who died in 1910. The earliest documented version appears in Harry Lloyd Miller's "Creative Learning and Teaching" (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927), p. 120, where it is credited to Edwin E. Slosson. Via Quotle.info · Verbatim: “Lecturing is that mysterious process by means of which the contents of the note-book of the professor are transferred through the instrument of the fountain pen to the note-book of the student without passing through the mind of either.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Mark Twain. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Edwin E. Slosson — American chemist, editor and first head of Science Service. Theme: "The Professor's Lecture Notes Go Straight to the Students' Lecture Notes". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "The Professor's Lecture Notes Go Straight to the Students' Lecture Notes". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where the joke actually comes from

Earliest documented form
Creative Learning and Teaching
Published
1927 · Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York · quote page 120
Credited there to
Edwin E. Slosson (1865–1929), unsourced
Twain connection
None documented — not found in his works, and he died in 1910

In the inimitable phrasing of Slosson, “Lecturing is that mysterious process by means of which the contents of the note-book of the professor are transferred through the instrument of the fountain pen to the note-book of the student without passing through the mind of either.” 1927

Harry Lloyd Miller, Creative Learning and Teaching (1927), page 120 — the earliest instance Quote Investigator located ↗. Note that Miller quotes Slosson without a citation, and no matching sentence has been found in Slosson’s own published work.

Precursor passage · scanned book, 1910
Great American Universities, page 520, at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator: The Professor's Lecture Notes Go Straight to the Students' Lecture Notes

The paper trail

  • 1910 — Edwin E. Slosson gives the argument in full on page 520 of Great American Universities: students who “remove the expressions from their faces,” and an “automatic cut-off” that short-circuits the lecture “from the ear directly to the hand.” Verifiable in the scanned text at the Internet Archive ↗. The idea — but not the epigram.
  • 1927 — the earliest instance Quote Investigator located: Harry Lloyd Miller’s Creative Learning and Teaching, page 120, quoting “the inimitable phrasing of Slosson.” Miller’s book is catalogued at Open Library ↗ as a 1927 Charles Scribner’s Sons title.
  • 1929–1943 — the line comes loose from its author: a Michigan student (1929), Stanford’s Professor Rathburn (1939), and anonymous printings in Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Read a Book (1940) and Evan Esar’s comic dictionary (1943), all catalogued by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 2012 — the Twain-branded “college is a place” wording appears in a TED blog post on massive online education ↗, the earliest Twain-credited instance QI documents.

No copyright status is asserted for the popular Twain-branded wording: it has no identified author and no known first publication, so there is nothing to attach a status to. The two historical texts quoted on this page are a different matter — Slosson’s Great American Universities (Macmillan, 1910) and Miller’s Creative Learning and Teaching (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927) were both published well before 1931 and are in the US public domain; the Internet Archive scan of the Slosson is marked not in copyright ↗.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Everyone it has been pinned on

This is a saying with an unusually crowded credit line. In the sixteen years after it first appeared in print it was assigned to three different people and left unsigned at least four more times — and Mark Twain, the name attached to it today, is the very last arrival.

Mark Twain No evidence

Quote Investigator reports “no substantive evidence connecting this saying to Mark Twain,” and the earliest Twain-credited instance it documents is a TED blog post from June 2012 ↗ about massive online education — more than eighty years after the saying was already in circulation under other names.

Professor Rathburn of Stanford University Late ascription

A 1939 statistics journal credited him with “A lecture is a process whereby the notes of the professor become the notes of the student without passing through the minds of either,” but QI notes this is a relatively late date ↗ for a saying already in print by 1927.

An unnamed University of Michigan student 1929

In March 1929 The American Journal of Nursing printed wording close to Miller’s but ascribed it to “a University of Michigan student” ↗ rather than to Slosson.

“Some cynic” and other anonymities Unattributed

National Municipal Review (May 1927), a Texas newspaper and columnist Rex Beach (both 1931), Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Read a Book (1940) and Evan Esar’s comic dictionary (1943) all carried it with no name attached ↗.

The best-supported line of descent runs through Slosson, not Twain: Quote Investigator concludes ↗ that Slosson was the first person to receive credit and the first to write thematically similar passages — while stating plainly that there is “no direct evidence yet that he wrote one of the clever and concise versions of the quip.”

Context

Why the joke had teeth

Slosson was not making a joke in 1910 — he was making an accusation. In the closing pages of Great American Universities he described a lecture hall as “about as inspiring an audience as a roomful of phonographs holding up their brass trumpets,” and claimed students had unconsciously wired themselves an “automatic cut-off” that ran the lecture from ear to hand without troubling the brain in between.

Somebody — possibly Slosson, possibly a colleague quoting him loosely — compressed that page of invective into one sentence, and the sentence has outlived the argument by a century. It was reprinted anonymously through the 1930s and 40s, ascribed to a Stanford professor in 1939 and to an unnamed Michigan student in 1929, and only picked up Mark Twain’s name once online education gave it a second life.

They just take it down.

The full chain of attributions, 1910 to 2012

1910 — Slosson’s Great American Universities, page 520: the phonograph passage and the “automatic cut-off” that short-circuits the lecture “from the ear directly to the hand.” The idea, but not the epigram.

1927 — Miller’s Creative Learning and Teaching gives the fountain-pen version and credits Slosson; the same year, National Municipal Review gives a plainer version and credits only “some cynic.”

1928–1943 — Edward Randall Maguire repeats Miller’s Slosson credit; the American Journal of Nursing hands it to a Michigan student; Texas newspapers and columnist Rex Beach run it unsigned; a statistics journal gives it to Stanford’s Professor Rathburn; Mortimer J. Adler and Evan Esar both print it anonymously.

2012 — a TED blog post on massive online education opens with “Mark Twain thought so,” and the Twain version is the one that now circulates.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Knowledge Work Truth

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the full investigationquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor research: every dated citation from 1910 to 2012, and the finding that no substantive evidence connects the saying to Mark Twain.
Great American Universities (1910)archive.org

Free full scan of Slosson's book. Page 520 carries the phonograph and “automatic cut-off” passages that prefigure the quip.
Creative Learning and Teaching (1927)openlibrary.org

Catalog record for Harry Lloyd Miller's book — the earliest known appearance of the saying — confirming publisher and year.
Edwin Emery Slossonen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the chemist, editor and science populariser the line has been credited to since 1927.
The Apocryphal Twainmarktwainstudies.com

The Center for Mark Twain Studies' ongoing series on quotations falsely pinned to Twain. It does not cover this particular line, but explains the pattern.
Mark Twainen.wikipedia.org

Confirms Twain's dates — 30 November 1835 to 21 April 1910 — which put him seventeen years dead before the saying's first known printing.

The man it was first credited to

About Edwin E. Slosson

Edwin E. Slosson

1865–1929 · American chemist, editor and first head of Science Service

Edwin Emery Slosson was an American chemist who became one of the country’s most widely read science popularisers, working as literary editor of The Independent before becoming the first head of Science Service. His 1910 book Great American Universities grew out of a magazine series and was unusually blunt about what he thought lectures actually accomplished. He is better remembered for Creative Chemistry (1919), a genuine bestseller, than for the one-line joke that educators have been crediting to him since 1927.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented version

Harry Lloyd Miller, Creative Learning and Teaching (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927), 120 — the earliest instance located by Quote Investigator, "Quote Origin: The Professor's Lecture Notes Go Straight to the Students' Lecture Notes," 17 August 2012. Miller credits the phrasing to Edwin E. Slosson; no version has been found in Slosson's own writing.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The Professor's Lecture Notes Go Straight to the Students' Lecture Notes’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-professors-lecture-notes-go-straight-to-the-students/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied