On a cold Wednesday day in the Winter of 2023 a lecturer for Massey University delivered a presentation that no student heard. This presentation was not advertised, but was in a central and prominent location on the campus, in a room with glass walls and its doors wide open. Hundreds of people saw this presentation take place, and a dozen or so curious onlookers entered the room at different points of the lecturer’s oratory. In the room was a stool that the lecturer occasionally perched on, although mostly he paced slowly while speaking into a microphone connected to the speaker system in the room. Facing this lecturer was five chairs, all different types. They remained empty for the duration of the lecture, despite the occasional student coming in to listen. This lecturer was delivering a Soapbox, and his audience were the students that, for all sorts of reasons, could not access what he had to say. He delivered this Soapbox, this lecture, to no one, but a particular and explicit no one. His knowledge was shared with the missing learners from his University in a method that they could not access; only those rare curious onlookers who crossed the threshold into his glass room were educated. The lecture was not for them, but they gained the knowledge because they were in the right place, at the right time.

Open air public oratory, or soapboxing, is an artistic tradition that originates the way people share and debate ideas. Since people began congregating into communities of relative strangers, mostly due to the advent of cities, we have taken opportunities to express beliefs and rally allies to our causes. This has traditionally occurred in outdoor public spaces where people naturally come together for other reasons. Orators would often present to the public in parks, market squares and other areas that people are already enjoying together as strangers.

This oratory has been historically foundational in how we establish philosophies and paradigms that could reliably be developed through discourse. Sounding out ideas with others in increasing detail and discussion is how we understood the world around us, and only once writing and publishing written works became accessible to the masses did oratory lose its dominance as the primary method of cultural expansion.

Today the written word remains dominant, and the foundations of soapboxing have become digital. So what defines soapboxing and separates it from other written communication?

A traditional soapbox event would be understood from the era that particular term was coined; the late 19th century moving towards pre World War I. It was at this point in England and Europe, that the common worker upturned their soapbox crates to stand on a street corner and have ‘street meetings’. This was the golden era of the Labour movement, where reforms for worker conditions were fought for through multiple channels of negotiation and conflict, and Soapboxing was a feature of information dissemination. This soapbox was spontaneous; you would more likely stumble upon a soapbox presentation than be invited to one, and no permission was sought by authorities to hold these events. By the virtues of free speech these orators would present their views, and the only barrier to access of this information was being at the right place and the right time. This freedom to express ideas was staunchly defended, however over time there have been adjustments to this fundamental right that defends others ability to express their own views. For example it remains forbidden to insight violence in others, and to express hatred to people or groups. The rules of engagement for public discourse remain contended, and modern traditional Soapboxers often present on highly controversial subjects.

A modern, and therefore digitized and written Soapbox would be a discourse on topics that are spontaneously presented, with no particular authorised event for dissemination. Institutions do not present Soapboxes; only people do, and institutions also do not allow or disallow them either unless they have the legal right to stop such presentations. Therefore a modern Soapbox would be a private blog (like this one), a social media post of an individual’s views as well as comment threads of discussion, and perhaps a newsletter or other informational service by people for people. The information that is most valued by people was once in this very form, however in the modern era we have a new format of valued information.

This art form is the origins of the much more systematic education system that we utilise today; state primary and secondary education, and relatively privatised tertiary education. Universities still rely heavily on an adapted form of Soapboxing; the lecture. Lecturing is oratory from a qualified person delivered to students who wish to learn what the lecturer knows. This is very similar to a Soapbox, however it has been moved away from this description for a number of reasons.

Firstly, lecturing is delivered by a person, but that person is under the authority of the relevant University. This institutionalisation of delivery is important to note; lecturers are required to deliver content that the University desires to be delivered. In general, lecturers have strong academic freedoms to deliver content as they see fit, and the control Universities have over content is limited by the virtue that the lecturer is the specialist, and they know the content better than anyone else. It must be acknowledged, however, that Soapboxers have no institutional authority that requires consent for information to be delivered. The importance of this distinction cannot be overstated, and there are starkly different risks associated with each system of communication. Where University lectures carry the risk of institutionalised norms being enforced, and therefore stagnation of ideas and an unwillingness to discuss controversy, Soapboxers are uninhibited, which risks their information to in fact be misinformation, and carries a higher risk of disseminating informational hazards, conspiracy theories and propaganda.

Secondly, Universities only deliver courses that have student enrolments. Some courses are compulsory for students to enroll in a major or degree, and these course’s information is considered important by the University (and also often the Government or industry bodies), whereas others are elective, and therefore run based on the popularity of course enrolments. Compulsory courses have their information qualified by institutions, which is expressed by the first point above. Elective courses, however, involve an additional separation of University education from its Soapbox origins; the free market interfering with information. Soapboxers do engage in a free market of information in the same way as Universities, however a Soapboxer cannot be silenced because they do not draw enough crowds. In fact, traditional Soapboxers are known to continue their presentation even when no one is listening. It is this artistic distinction that is important to note; Universities silence unpopular presenters because students won’t enroll in a course. Soapboxers are incentivised socially to be silenced when no one will listen, and it is observed that a Soapbox orator develops their content based on the crowds they draw. Over time a Soapboxer changes what they say to attract listeners, and therefore in a more direct manner their information is changed by the free market. With that acknowledged, fundamentally a Soapboxer may present views that are unheeded by passers by, whereas lecturers are not offered the opportunity to express views that students will not enroll in (unless of course it is a compulsory course, which comes with the aforementioned authority of the institution rather than free market principles).

Finally, and most importantly, a lecture is not publicly available. Soapboxes are in the free world; they are on a publicly accessible blog, a street corner or newsletter. Universities privatise the orator’s information by presenting barriers to access through enrolments. Enrolling in a University course is a bundle of many barriers, the chief of which is a time commitment. This main barrier is similarly applied to all forms of education including Soapboxes, and as it cannot be avoided is an ineradicable barrier. In addition to this however, enrolling in a University course also has other barriers attached, the most prominent being the financial barrier in most tertiary educational systems. Where there are no financial barriers to entry there are often instead prior educational achievements required, like secondary school results of entrance exams (both barriers exist in some form for all Universities in New Zealand). Add to this other institutional barriers that remain stubbornly present which can broadly be summarised as discrimination, whether ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, culture or income. These other barriers remain in University systems, and although Soapboxing has rampant controversial presentations that can only be described as discriminatory (and in some cases hate speech or misinformation), the audience members do not face individual barriers to listen to their choice of orator. In the digitised form there are no barriers at all to consuming information from Soapboxers, whereas a discriminatory lecturer may fail students for reasons beyond their merit, causing their educational access to be restricted for reasons beyond their control when compared to public information like Soapboxes. In fact, the testing element to University education, while important to qualify a student’s knowledge, is a barrier itself to accessing further knowledge held by the University in higher level courses.

With these differences, we can see that lectures from Universities carry with them risks of an echo chamber due to insitutionalised norms, catering information to mass enrolments due to a financial incentive, and providing huge barriers to access to their presentations. Practicing Soapboxes is an antidote to these risks, and although the artform carries its own problems, it should be celebrated and welcomed onto campuses (perhaps in a regulated manner). In particular, there is an opportunity for the privatised information in lecturer’s heads to be made available to the public on an accessible forum. Universities hold valuable information that people with barriers to access arguably have a right to hear, and the institution has an opportunity to counter the more radical forms of modern Soapboxing by occupying that same space with the qualified thinkers that they employ.