Professors and TAs with heavy foreign accents

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Mon, 27 Jan 2014 02:24:09 +0000

I just read this previous post and think I have a solution -

Both of my daughters now have had foreign professors with accents so thick they can’t understand a word they say. It’s not just my Ds (daughters), it’s almost every student in the class.

One D took a class in the summer at UCSD with a visiting French professor who could barely speak English, took a long time to formulate a sentence and spoke so lowly that it was difficult to even hear her. The class ended up down to 3 or 4 students left attending lectures since almost all students just dropped her class.

Both Ds (UCSD and UCLA) have had Asian professors who were unintelligible due to their heavy accents (as opposed to the Asian professors with accents that were somewhat understandable).

The primary purpose of having a professor teach a class is to convey information. They’re in America in that position and due to an inability to speak our language, English, fail miserably at this task. If they can’t convey information it’s irrelevant how bright they are or how great the accomplishments they’ve made in their field are.

Why do universities hire these people or allow them to teach on an exchange basis? Is it just so they can do research and are required to teach a class so the uni just lets the students suffer? Is it because it’s that terribly difficult to hire a competent professor who is either a native English speaker or at least fluent? Is it because the foreign professors want to spend a semester or two in La Jolla at someone else’s expense? Is this something seen mostly at colleges like the UCs or is it rampant throughout the college system?

This has been a very frustrating issue for my Ds. Fortunately it’s not all professors but IMO there shouldn’t be any that can’t adequately convey information due to an inability to speak English at an acceptable level.

Here’s the solution -

What would happen if students, who were stuck with professors who either have strong accents, can’t teach, can’t read their writing, etc, if students ALL agreed together (privately online) to boycott the class by not showing up again and then letting the administration know that the professor now has no students to teach and is therefore out of a job, and therefore the administration need to immediately find a replacement before students start parading around outside the campus with signs that will bring on the media and tarnish the schools reputation? This will put huge pressure on the administration to act appropriately in the interest of the students if they want to save the school’s reputation so future students will continue to apply there. It would be so cool to see students not put up with this crap anymore and take charge of this awful situation at colleges all over the country. If you can’t speak English well, or can’t teach well, or can’t write clearly, then don’t apply for the job cause you won’t last when the students dump you via boycotting your class! What a great idea! This will revolutionize colleges and clean out all the dead wood teachers from every campus! This needs to go viral and be re-posted by every student in America in every place that they can post it! We’re fed up and we’re NOT going to take it anymore!!! We’ll decide who gets to teach us and who is wasting our time and money!