By Rob Jenkins of Minding the Campus
My colleague at Minding the Campus, Jared Gould, has written persuasively on the problem of colleges and universities over-admitting foreign students, who can fill seats that should have gone to American students, drive up costs for everyone, and ultimately take jobs from American workers.
In my view, however, a more pressing issue—although one that is rarely broached, lest the complainant be labeled “xenophobic”—is that of foreign-born professors, especially those whose command of spoken English is, shall we say, less than optimal.
These days, institutions have come to rely more and more on non-native Ph.D.s. Just scan through the faculty roster at any American university and see how many names you can pronounce. This is a problem for some of the same reasons Jared mentions: Not only did many of these professors take grad-school seats from American students, they eventually took jobs that might have gone to American candidates.
There’s another problem with foreign-born professors, though, on an even more basic level: Students often struggle to understand them in class. If students literally can’t grasp what the professor is saying, due to a language barrier, how can they learn the material? Often, they resort to essentially teaching themselves, using textbooks, study groups, and online aids.
The daughter of a good friend is currently in medical school at a large, highly respected Southeastern university. I had a chance to chat with her over the holidays and asked her how it was going. What she said frankly shocked me.
According to her, not a single one of her medical school professors, so far, has been American-born. All speak with thick accents, although some are clearer than others. Asking questions in class doesn’t help much, because she often can’t understand the answers. And she isn’t alone. Her classmates all have the same problem.
So how are they supposed to learn this information that is presumably so important for doctors to know—information they will be tested over, repeatedly, throughout their years in medical school, culminating in board examinations?
This bright young woman, along with her classmates and many other medical students all over the country, has simply taken matters into her own hands, purchasing expensive software that covers the same material. She attends class religiously each day, then goes home and spends eight or ten more hours watching videos. Despite shelling out tens of thousands of dollars on an “elite” medical school education, she is essentially having to teach herself—all because her professors don’t speak clear English.
This is just one example of what seems to be a widespread problem. In my 40 years of college teaching and advising, I’ve had dozens of students complain to me that they have one or more professors they can’t understand, particularly in mathematics, engineering, and the hard sciences.
How did we get ourselves into this situation, and how can we get out of it?
The answer to the first question, which also suggests an answer to the second, is that we got here mainly by prioritizing research over teaching—in some cases, by a wide margin. Indeed, some of our most prestigious institutions seem to value research almost exclusively and teaching hardly at all. Almost any tenure-track professor at a Research 1 university will tell you that their annual evaluations and tenure bids are highly focused on research, publishing, and grant procurement, with teaching coming in a distant second, if that. In other words, if a candidate is an accomplished researcher or has the potential to be, schools don’t really care if students can understand them or not.
The simple solution is for institutions to prioritize teaching, or at least make it equal to research. Honestly, most of what passes for “research” these days is either derivative naval-gazing or unreproducible nonsense; only a relative handful of professors are doing truly groundbreaking work in any field. The rest should be expected to teach more and publish less, and be evaluated accordingly. Departments, too, should be judged primarily on how well students learn in their classes, not on how many journal articles they produce or how much grant money they generate.
With a renewed emphasis on teaching, departments might start to care a little more about whether students can actually understand their professors and make that an integral part of the screening process for new faculty. Some institutions already do this, but every candidate for a faculty position should have to give a public presentation that students are encouraged to attend—bribed with food, if necessary—and their opinions solicited.
In that way, perhaps we can eventually move beyond this frankly untenable situation in which even our brightest students sometimes struggle to pick up on important concepts. We might be pleasantly surprised at how much and how fast they learn once they actually understand what their professors are saying.
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