“I Can’t Understand My Professor”
16th May 2025
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.