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A Republican state legislator in North Dakota has introduced a bill there requiring all foreign-born teaching assistants in state universities to be able to proficiently speak English, on the grounds that the native sons and daughters of the prairie can't understand what they're being taught. Studnets who claim they can't understand their instructors would be able at least to withdraw from their classes and obtain refunds, at most to get the teacher removed from the classroom. (See the full story in the Chronicle of Higher Education or a briefer, less incisive account in the Fargo Forum.)

Even though an outside expert on intercultural communication has concluded that student perceptions are more important to comprehension than instructor speaking ability, the state legislator, Bette Grande, "is cool to the thought of culpability on the student's side of the linguistic equation. 'I can understand when they say the students just need to listen harder,' she says, acknowledging that that is the 'neighborly' thing to do. But she says there are limits to such strained good will. 'What if it was bearing on whether or not I was going to be able to grasp materials I was going to need for my profession?' she asks. When it comes down to it, Ms. Grande still believes that universities are businesses, and students are consumers: If a student cannot understand her professor, then she is being served a faulty product."

This is such rubbish, it's hard to believe that she'd say it. (If I rent a Caterpillar D10T and then wreck my house trying to use it in my yard, who's to blame - me or those dirty meanies at Cat?) But Grande is also quoted as saying, in re. the harshness of her bill, "if you don't push it to the envelope where they [university administrators] see that it's going to affect them financially, they're not going to come to the table." Who's got the shakier grasp of English idiom?

Anyhow, Grande's bill obviously rests not on a serious concern with language competence, but on her vision of universities as sites for transacting a specialized service exchange (common enough in modern higher ed) and for defending appropriate ethnoracial, professional, and commercial hierarchies. North Dakota kids shouldn't have to be taught by people so different from themselves - people who are not only not Caucasian, but who, in the words of one Chinese TA at North Dakota State, have "experienced a totally different classroom culture. I had total authority in the classroom. Here, it's almost like the opposite." The NDSU provost even says (in the Forum article) that "We've got one professor from Boston, and we've had (instructors with) Southern accents and we've had complaints about those. We've had complaints that are baseless. That gets kind of embarrassing."

While this evidence might make it seem that Grande's bill isn't racist in intent (though it probably would be in outcome), it only straightens the line between this bill and other attacks on the discretion and perquisites of higher educators. Like David Horowitz's attacks on liberal faculty, this bill is a means to deskill academics from professional into service-economy "brainworkers" and to lift much student-borne responsibility for doing the hard work of learning.