THE LAMENT IS NOTHING NEW.

Minding the Campus contributor Rob Jenkins,  "I Can’t Understand My Professor."

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.

Perhaps that says something about compensation and working conditions in higher education. "Wouldn't there be plenty of professors, adjuncts, and TAs speaking impeccable English if the jobs the professors held and the adjuncts and TAs aspired to were as cushy as a lot of this college-bubble talk suggests they were?"

The anecdote Mr Jenkins continues with was relevant 45 years ago, on my first tenure-track job.

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.

Perhaps the pay packets for private sector mathematicians, engineers, and laboratory sciences are more attractive to native speakers of English.  Throw in going on sixty years of "new math" and attempts to make difficult subjects more inclusive, at the expense of people learning anything and it won't get any better.

Anecdote from course evaluations of that first semester: one comment was "So nice to have an American teacher."  Make of that what you will.