Is my accent a crime? (UNCLASSIFIED)

[George Thompson]

Me: >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.

LH: 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...

Me, again: My memory of this case is entirely summarized in the 2 sentences above.
I suppose the basis of the suit was that the plaintiff took Calculus 101 with the intention of taking Calculus 102, and alleged that due to the inadequacy of the teacher, which inadequacy the university knew of, or should have known of, he was unprepared for the more advanced course.  The teacher wouldn't have been a defendant.
One defense would be to show that the other students of that teacher did deal successfully with the 102 course; another would be to show that the plaintiff had been a poor student, cut classes, &c.

Why should a university assign classes to "a teacher whose command of the subject matter" is inadequate?  What if a professor of geology teaches that the world is flat, or is 6000 years old (or, if teaching at Liberty University, he teaches that it is 8 billion years old)?  If the university does use such a teacher, shouldn't the students have a recourse beyond anticipating the problem and enrolling in another section or majoring in another field?
Does "command of ... the latest fashionable theory" allude to Chomskyism, ca. 1975?

I have entrusted my health to foreign-born doctors, but I wouldn't have done so if I had been unable to understand their instructions to me, or had thought that they did not understand me.
It's not only a matter of native speaker vs. second language speaker.  I wouldn't take my cat to a veterinarian whose command of English was no better than that of our former president, who is not to be named.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
Date: Monday, August 2, 2010 10:47 am
Subject: Re: Is my accent a crime? (UNCLASSIFIED)
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org