Some time ago, in the conclusion to the debate over Samuel Huntington's latest work that took place in these pages, I had occasion to recount an unfortunate experience I had as a graduate student in a computer science course, where I was wholly unable to communicate with my non-English-speaking TAs. While I found this an obnoxious state of affairs, it never would have occurred to me to ask for my money back.
State Representative Bette Grande of Fargo, North Dakota, feels differently. Here are the relevant parts describing her proposed legislation (full text available here) for the North Dakota university system:
Grande is sponsoring legislation that would bar teachers from undergraduate courses if they cannot clearly speak English. Students who complain in writing about a teacher's diction would be refunded their tuition and fee payments for that course...Grande's legislation requires instructors to prove their command of English in an interview before they're allowed to teach. The measure also says teachers must be pulled from the classroom if 10 percent of students in a class complain about the teacher's speaking ability.
Before addressing the merits of such a law, let's get the purely pragmatic objection out of the way, as voiced by a university official:
"Our students are very bright and will soon learn to use this law as an excuse to drop any class with a bad grade to receive a complete refund," said Michel Hillman, a North Dakota university system vice chancellor.
Clearly, there is potential for abuse here; as written, the bill would lead to exactly this outcome (section 2 makes this automatic "upon request of the student", with no conditions subjecting the student's claims to review). But it's not terribly difficult to imagine appropriate revisions that could alleviate the abuses, and so I'd prefer to get away from the details of implementing such a law to concentrate on the fundamental issues.
Rep. Grande is quoted making two points in support of her bill. Her primary argument is that "[T]he Number 1 priority of higher education is instructing the student, the paying customer." Secondly, "The current process may be accomplishing the goals of research and diversity, but the question needs to be asked whether these need to be a priority over educating students." I think it would be cheap and entirely too easy to merely dismiss this as xenophobia or bigotry. It is hard to deny that the law is poorly thought through -- it demands that faculty be vetted for speaking proficiency before being hired, and gives them very little protection from student complaints afterwards, which strikes me as a "heads I win, tails you lose" approach to handling language issues. But it's also fair for students to expect that lectures and tutoring will occur in a language they understand. They are, as Rep. Grande noted, the paying customers.
Obviously, that expectation varies by subject. If a student is taking a foreign language class taught through immersion, it would be ridiculous for such a law to be applied -- yet another argument against the bill as it presently exists. Such a bill seems aimed largely at departments where a large number of foreigners immigrate for the purposes of obtaining graduate degrees and conducting research.
A fair rebuttal is that if a field contains a large number of non-native English speakers, then students desiring to pursue a career in that field had better be prepared to deal with them. After all, the students will continue to enjoy linguistic advantages in a number of respects -- many (most?) journals with aspirations of international significance are published in English, conferences are conducted in English, and for the most part, business is as well. In that light, it's hard to argue with Sarah Beck, quoted as follows:
Students must learn to work with people who speak in different ways, and colleges shouldn't be expected to hire teachers "that only speak with a Midwestern accent," she said.
I am not sure whether or not it should be relevant that the bill as written applies to undergraduate education only. I think one might reasonably argue that one's undergraduate major represents less of a commitment to making a career in a particular field than going for graduate work in the same field. Students taking courses to satisfy distribution requirements don't necessarily intend to work in a field which requires accomodating a wide range of levels of English proficiency. It seems to me that Ms. Beck's point is broadly applicable regardless of major, and that the graduate/undergraduate issue is therefore a moot one.
Ultimately, it is easiest to sympathize with Rep. Grande's point in regard to the aims of the institution, of whether teaching or research is to be prioritized. I do not think I am slandering graduate students or junior faculty at research-oriented universities if I observe that teaching is often considered merely a necessary evil to be handed off to those who need to do something for their stipends, or who don't have enough seniority to get out of teaching undergrads. This isn't an attitude that has anything to do with native languages; it's true across the board, especially where publications are the primary metric of success. I would not have been at all surprised to learn that the TAs in the computer science class mentioned at the beginning of this post were exceptional students; if the university denied them funding as TAs because they couldn't meet higher language standards, they might have attracted replacements from within the U.S. or other English-speaking countries, but at the cost of not getting the best research talent from the global pool. At the same time, not all schools try to be research-first, and so this may not be as relevant a consideration for them. Trying to emphasize the importance of teaching is a laudable goal; it's a shame that Rep. Grande's efforts in that regard are unlikely to accomplish it.
Students must be exposed to everything that they will be exposed to in the real world. And that includes teachers with different teaching techniques and different ways of relating to their students. This will help the students to adjust easily to whatever that is put on front of them. After they graduate, they will get jobs, they will deal with different kinds of people. If they are only used to talking to eloquent people, they might not be able to cope with the diversity of the real world.
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Posted by: Payday Loan Advocate | September 11, 2008 at 02:47 AM