The real kicker? The reappointment committee allegedly told him (this is third-hand rumor, he is too upright to pass this on himself) that he did very well with bright students but not so well with mediocre ones, and this was a reason not to renew him. In his second year, four years before the tenure decision! the mind boggles….

This is quite true. My wife and I now have an ongoing ‘guess the non-American accent’ contest, which is an attempt to ensure that she doesn’t accidentally call a South African an Australian, or someone from Ireland Welsh. She’s getting much better at it, though she also has trouble with some of the mountain-country accents in WNC.

(To my amusement, when the Discovery Times channel rebroadcast a Channel 4 series on the Hajj, featuring pilgrims from around the world, the only one given subtitles was from my home town, and had an accent much like my own.)

Someone teaching, or studying, at a university in an English speaking country ought to have excellent spoken and written English.

Accents are largely irrelevant and unless someone has a genuine speech impediment the problem is more with the listener than the speaker.

But accents are the wrong thing to attack as professors with a poor understanding of English language structure are probably the root problem. People bitching about accents should be slapped silly and forced to sit through a review of their complaints by the most cynical bastards to teach at that University.

As someone who observes the US from up north and pronounces “cot” and “caught” the same (I’d better not apply to NDSU when I finish my PhD!), I can’t help but wonder if Grande’s proposal would have gone anywhere in, say, New York or California.

Is this a genuinely “made in Fargo” proposal?

Such blatant bias against native Americans is shocking and unconscionable.

The law as described sounds bad, but the problem probably is real.

This might not be racism. Americans, and this is not meant to be a slur, just generally aren’t very good with accents of English other than their own. The British, no doubt in part because accents play such an important role as class-markers, seem, in my experience, to be much more attuned to accents.

You’d have to compare US students being taught by non-Americans from a variety of backgrounds to make the claim that there’s something racist going on… e.g. students being taught by Brits with strong regional accents or by eastern europeans or whatever.

This might seem a small matter to some, but to the proverbial starving student, it’s incredibly offensive to pay good money for instruction that might as well be in a foreign language. Sure, we were able to learn from the textbooks, but we were paying for the class time, too, and for all practical purposes we weren’t getting it.

The bill may be an over-reaction, but the problem is quite real.

I’d note that “counterintuitively” ((c) Steven Landsburg), foreign-born students had a nil effect; the effect is entirely American student/non-American teacher. So apparently Asian TAs and students speak a special pidgin English which they can understand between themselves perfectly but which is incomprehensible to natives. Or possibly, there is a little bit (ie a statistically but not practically significant amount) of racism in Harvard, whereby students refuse to learn from brown people put in a position of authority over them.

Mr. Hacker says he has taken several classes where the instructor’s accented English was difficult to comprehend. “There were days when I would go home and have to study the material that they had taught, for the simple reason that I couldn’t understand the things that came out of their mouth,”

Forced to go home and study the material! Heavens above what’s the world coming to! Somebody spoon-feed poor little diddums, quick!

Btw, I wouldn’t take “It notes research suggesting that students in sections taught by foreign born T.A.s do worse than students in sections taught by native Americans” at face value[1]. Looking at the Borjas paper, we’re talking about a difference of 0.2 points on a 4-point scale with an average of 3.15. The phrase “statistically but not practically significant” definitely comes to mind; this is a good example of the sort of thing Deirdre McCloskey doesn’t like about the AER.

[1](tangentially, I can only think of one economics professor who is a native American, and that’s Jim Craven)