As diversity continues to grow at the university through foreign students and staff, a growing complaint among students is they have professors they cannot understand because of their thick accents and poor command of the English language.
Senior Glenn Puzio said as a chemical engineering major, he has struggled with a foreign language barrier in a majority of his classes, hindering his learning process.
"It creates another obstacle in learning the material," Puzio said. "If you can't understand the person who's teaching it to you, how are you ever going to learn it well?"
He said he thinks the university should take the ability to convey a lesson in English into account when hiring faculty at the university.
"They have people from China, Africa and India and it might mean they can speak English grammatically correct, but their accent is so heavy that we can't understand it," he said.
Associate Provost for Faculty Administration Maxine Colm said university President Patrick Harker's administration is committed to extending its borders beyond the outer limits of campus by reaching out to the global community.
"President Harker and the new administration are anxious to diversify both our student body and our faculty as we go forward because it's his feeling the path to excellence lies in a very diverse student body," Colm said.
In terms of hiring, she said the university has expanded its opportunities to include great minds across the globe.
"We're changing as a university and we're looking at the whole world as our hiring potential," Colm said.
When hiring, the university's primary goal is to find the best minds in any given field of study rather than focusing on the level of proficiency in the English language, she said.
"We certainly would not make the command of the language a requirement for hiring when you're looking at all the other important elements - do they know their discipline, what is their background, can they teach at the level we expect of our faculty and our students?" Colm said. "Command of the discipline has to be the most important quality."
She said the university would never hire professors who are incomprehensible, but a foreign accent would not deter the university from hiring a skilled professor.
"We have to guard against using diversity and having a diverse accent as a way of not having good people here at the university,"Colm said.
Cihan Cobanoglu, a hotel, restaurant and institutional management professor who emigrated from Turkey 12 years ago, said both educators and students need to be committed to understanding each other in order to combat this problem.
"Teachers are responsible for ensuring a positive environment for open communication but students are responsible for asking those questions without any fear," Cobanoglu said.
As a non-native speaker he encourages students to ask questions, be upfront and have open communication, he said. He attempts to ease the difficulty posed by language barriers by using PowerPoint slides to teach lessons by bulleting key points.
Cobanoglu said he hopes other professors, both those who speak English as a first language and non-native speakers, encourage students to approach them about ways to improve their teaching.
"As professors we all strive to excel and constructive criticism is critical," he said.
Cobanoglu said education should stress the importance of being multicultural, multilingual and interacting with the global community.
"Students should take the challenge to understand non-native speakers because people who speak English as a second language could be your managers, employees and co-workers in the future," he said. "You're going to need to know how to communicate with these people."
Colm said students should realize interacting with non-native English speakers is a necessity for their future.
"Students are going to be traveling the world, so when the companies they work for send them overseas, are they going to complain about it?" she said.
Puzio said although he realizes that interacting with non-native English speakers will be a part of his future, he questions why he is forced to do so in an educational setting.
"I understand you have to deal with different cultures and people who don't speak English perfectly," he said. "I think in the learning system were trying to make our engineers and people better so I don't think they need to add even more obstacles for students."
Tom Apple, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said in a globalizing world, people need to work and interact with people from different countries, so the sooner students begin this process, the better.
"The way the world works today when students graduate and get a job they are going to have to deal with international people from all types of countries who are speaking English as a second language," Apple said. "There is a very definite silver lining to being exposed to professors from different countries."
Students will need to learn to adapt with the changing state of the world, he said.
"For a very long time now we have been by far the largest economy in the world and the most powerful country," Apple said. "We do tend to probably have a rather ethnocentric view of the world, but that's probably going to change and it has to change because we're just one of many now as these other countries grow up and develop economically."
Complaints from university students about the foreign language barrier may signal a larger societal problem that needs to be rectified, he said.
"Your generation needs to get into the mindset that we are just one of many, many nations and English is not the primary language of most people of earth," Apple said.
Colm said rather than focusing on professors with accents, the university may have a larger problem at hand.
"Maybe we need to do a better job of making students understand it's a big world," Colm said.
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