This is exactly what frustrates me about Engineering

[boneh3ad]

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@Balthezar

Bone, if what you say is true then how do you explain what the OP is saying about not being able to understand the instructor? Of course I’m not saying don’t hire anyone whose native language isn’t English, but regardless of the workload and compensation of an instructor, if a majority of his/her students can’t understand them, that is unacceptable. You’re saying they assess oral communication skills during the hiring process, and yet the OP posts that he finds it hard understand the material due to the heavy accent of the instructor? Something doesn’t jibe here.

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<p>I can really only speculate as to why the OP’s situation is occurring. All I can say is that I know for a fact that for tenure-track faculty, there is a roughly one hour oral presentation that is part of the grueling interview process as well as meeting with and conversing with a large portion of the hiring department. Each point along the way in that process involves assessment of oral communication skills. Clearly the department that hired the professor in the OP felt that she had adequate oral communication skills assuming she is a tenure-track professor. I am not familiar with the adjunct hiring process, but I would assume it likely has at least some degree of assessment of oral communication since that is the primary job function.</p>

<p>Perhaps the dichotomy here is a result of the people doing the hiring simply having more experience understanding accents. Generally speaking, the longer you spend in engineering, especially in academe, the better you get at deciphering accents. It may be that newer students don’t have those skills yet but those who do the hiring have them after years of practice and so are out of touch with just how broken the English actually is. It also may be exaggeration. I couldn’t really say with any certainty. All I know is that said faculty almost certainly had her oral communication assessed during the hiring process. Beyond that I don’t know.</p>

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@Balthezar

Are you saying there aren’t enough primary English language PhDs out there willing to work as adjuncts, and the best we can hope for is that those PhDs that are willing to accept the paltry pay take enough classes to be able to bolster their ability to actually teach in a secondary language? If that’s the case, then the high cost of tuition to attend today’s universities is even more costly than I thought.

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<p>Generally speaking, no, there aren’t very many primarily-English-speaking PhDs willing to work as adjuncts because adjuncts get treated like absolute dirt. It’s a lot more common in areas like the humanities where a job’s a job, but in engineering where there are plenty of options available, most would rather go work in industry and have a weekend rather than get paid $40,000 a year for working an 60+ hour week. And yes, the high cost of education these days is a problem. Tuition keeps going up while universities rely more and more on adjunct faculty to save money, who studies have shown tend to provide lower-quality instruction than their tenure-track brethren. It’s a real problem. Government funding is an ever-dwindling pool and the administration side of things continues to get more and more bloated at many universities, taking up a lot of funding that should be going to paying the lowly adjuncts better or getting rid of adjuncts altogether. </p>