Is my accent a crime? (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:31 AM -0400 8/2/10, George Thompson wrote:
>  > >
>>  > Arizona has decided that it's unacceptable to have teachers
>>  > whose spoken English is deemed to be heavily accented or
>>  ungrammatical, even
>>  > though the latter has little to do with the former.
>>
>>  Anyone who has gone through an engineering curriculum at a state school
>>  in the last generation probably has horror stories of trying to
>>  understand a lecture given by a non-native born grad student whose
>>  accent was so thick as to make communication impossible.  I know I do.
>>
>
>Was there not a court case perhaps 30 years ago, in which a
>university was sued for using graduate students who were incapable
>of speaking intelligible English to work off their scholarship &
>stipend to teach undergraduate courses?
>As I recall, the plaintiff's position was that he paid his tuition
>to take the course because he wanted to learn calculus, or whatever,
>and that it was a form of fraud to assign the course to a teacher
>whose command of English was inadequate to communicate his knowledge
>of the subject.

Sounds like a bad precedent.  What if anyone could sue on the grounds
that they paid their tuition because they wanted to learn, say,
linguistics, and that it was a form of fraud to assign the course to
a teacher whose command of the subject matter, or of the latest
fashionable theory, was inadequate to communicate proper knowledge of
the subject?  I shudder to imagine the consequences...

>I did note with interest that the 3 murderers who escaped from the
>Arizona penitentiary last week all had surnames that suggested that
>they were Real Americans and fluent speakers of English.
>

I noticed that too.  I figured that the idea is to transfer all
violent felons to medium security prisons to make space for the truly
dangerous border crossers with funny accents.

LH

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