Agreed, I would on occasion skip class and read the text for an hour in grad school. It was amazing how much more I learned by reading and processing the ideas at my own pace instead of the lecture. The issue was you never knew when the professor would say something not in the text yet on the exam. I was in applied mathematics.

Meetings are equally pointless. Usually the most verbal people dominate the meeting. I've noticed how outspoken one is rarely correlated with critical thinking ability.