[lg policy] Italian court pushes back on the race towards English

Mon Feb 5 15:25:20 UTC 2018

 Italian court pushes back on the race towards English
Rosemary Salomone03 February 2018 Issue No:491
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After six years of winding through the Italian courts, the case challenging
the Polytechnic Institute of Milan’s decision to offer all graduate
programmes in English reached a final legal conclusion on 29 January. The
question now is whether the controversy fades from sight or the
implications push to the boiling point a simmering debate over the proper
place of English in academia.

*Backlash and trade-offs*

Last Monday the Consiglio di Stato, Italy’s high administrative court,
struck down the Polytechnic plan on constitutional grounds. While a triumph
for the 98 professors who challenged it back in 2012, it raises a number of
questions on the trade-offs that universities in Italy and beyond make as
they race towards English in the name of internationalisation and global
competition.

Those trade-offs have become ever more salient in recent years in light of
rising nationalism and a growing backlash against the progressive spread of
English taught courses.

In striking down the plan, the Consiglio di Stato applied principles laid
down by the Constitutional Court last year to affirm an earlier decision of
the regional administrative court. In the interim the court had asked for
the university to provide documentation on the number of programmes offered
in English, Italian or in both languages.

The opinion, largely a compilation of quotes from the Constitutional Court
with little additional rationale, affirms three principles that the goal of
internationalisation cannot jeopardise: the primacy of the Italian
language, the freedom of students to learn and the freedom of professors to
teach.

The Italian language, the court says, is a “fundamental element of cultural
identity”, not only essential to transmitting the country’s heritage but a
cultural asset in itself.

Teaching courses solely in a foreign language would remove Italian from
“complete branches of knowledge”. Moreover, it would deny students, without
adequate language support, the freedom to choose their own training and
future and prevent them from reaching “the highest grades in their
studies”.

Finally, it would affect how professors communicate with students and would
discriminate against them in the assignment of courses based on criteria
that have nothing to do with their competence in the subject matter they
have been hired to teach.

The university must now find a solution that maintains the institution’s
competitiveness in both retaining Italian students and attracting foreign
students who understand the value of an English-based degree in the global
job market.

Though the university never fully realised the 2012 plan, today all PhD
courses are in English while out of 45 masters courses, 15 are offered in
both languages and three solely in Italian. The remaining 27 are only in
English. Since 2014-15 to the present, the enrollment on degree programmes
in English has progressively jumped from 3,200 to 8,400.

Of the 17,000 masters students, 6,000 are foreigners. Ironically these
numbers have helped the university climb the international rankings to
first place in Italy in nine research areas and to 10th place among
European universities in six areas.

*A ‘beautiful victory’*

As the university mulls over its next steps, others have found cause to
celebrate. The president of the Accademia della Crusca, the Florentine
society dedicated to preserving the Italian language, has called the
decision a “beautiful victory”.

A petition posted on the internet following the Constitutional Court
decision last year and directed to the president of the Italian Republic
and others has now gathered more than 4,000 signatures. Entitled *L’italiano
siamo noi* (We are Italian), it makes a plea for a “new and diverse Italian
language policy”.

To what extent the court decision will affect internationalisation at the
Polytechnic Institute or at other Italian universities depends in part on
implementing guidelines the ministry of education, universities and
research presumably will issue.

Those guidelines could have a wide impact on universities across Italy. The
Polytechnic Institute is not alone in moving progressively towards English.
At the University of Trento, for example, almost all doctoral programmes
and about half the masters programmes are in English.

In the meantime much has happened since this controversy began six years
ago. Rising nationalism and global scepticism, combined with Brexit and
Trumpism, signal that English may be losing some of its appeal or
legitimacy.

This confluence of forces has spurred France’s President Emmanuel Macron to
fill the void in world leadership, repeatedly forecasting that French will
take its place as the number one language in the world. Notwithstanding the
French bravado, English as the dominant lingua franca is not about to
retreat in the near future. The global economy is far too dependent on it.

*Challenging the move towards English*

The broader and perhaps more interesting question is whether the court
decision will give momentum to a backlash that slowly has been taking
shape, especially in Northern European countries where English courses have
been prominent.

In the Netherlands, where 20% of bachelor programmes and 60% of masters
programmes are taught in English, the organisation Better Education
Netherlands (BON) has gathered close to 6,000 signatures on a ‘manifesto’
and has threatened to sue the Dutch government for failure to enforce a law
requiring that education and examinations must be taken in Dutch, with few
exceptions.

A 2015 poll of Dutch university students found that 60% complained of
lecturers whose English was incomprehensible. A report commissioned by the
Dutch ministry of education and published in 2017 by the Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences raised concerns about the quality of English
language programmes.

It advised universities to pay closer attention to the language skills of
students and professors and to exercise more thought in selecting courses
offered in English based on subject and learning objectives. More recently
the rector of the University of Amsterdam called for a balance to be struck
between Dutch and English courses.

In Germany academics have launched a campaign, ADAWIS, against the
predominance of English in scientific publications.

The Language Council of Norway has raised concerns that many students whose
entire programme is in English may not have sufficient mastery of the
language to succeed and that the vast majority of graduates enter the
Norwegian labour market where English proficiency is not essential.

A Manifesto in Defence of Scientific Multilingualism, originating in Spain
and published in seven languages, has now gathered close to 8,000
signatures of well-known scholars throughout Europe. Aimed at the European
Union, the manifesto challenges requirements from European scientific
committees that funding proposals be written in English.

Whether the Polytechnic decision will inspire any of these movements to
seek a legal resolution remains to be seen. At the very least the several
opinions that have emerged from the Italian courts in the course of the
litigation provide a well-developed rationale and framework for moving
forward the discussion on what is gained, what is lost and how the dangers
can be mitigated when using English as a vehicle for ‘internationalising’
universities.

*Rosemary Salomone is the Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St John’s
University School of Law, United States. She is the author of *True
American: Language, identity, and the education of immigrant children*
(Harvard University Press) and is currently writing a book on global
English, identity and linguistic justice for Oxford University Press.*

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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