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Comment by byoung2 | Hacker News Reader

the possibility of saying something that could land them in legal trouble When I worked for Kaplan (a subsidiary of the Washington Post), we were trained to not give any feedback after interviews or teacher auditions specifically for this reason. There was a situation where a potential teacher was not accepted after an audition and he asked why. A Kaplan representative told him that it was because he had a thick accent and that students would have trouble understanding him when he spoke. He filed a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination and in the end Kaplan settled out of court. Pretty much any reason you give for not hiring someone could be interpreted as discrimination of some kind. It may not be enough to win a lawsuit, but it is enough to force you to settle to avoid the bad PR.

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And, sadly, that is actually a good reason not to hire someone to teach a class. As many unfortunate students can attest.

I had a TA once who had an incomprehensible accent. When people complained, some honcho from the department came to class and berated everyone for complaining because she had passed all the qualification tests to lecture in English, despite the fact that actual students couldn't understand her.

This was in the business department. Apparently, the people who are supposed to be teaching how to run a business valued their own a priori qualification tests over the experiences of actual customers[1]. While the situation pissed me off even then, the irony did not occur to me until years later.

[1] Academics don't like the implication that students are customers, but in this case the analogy holds.

And those academics are right. Let me sidetrack for a bit, because this is an important point, that not everybody thinks of:

If students had to pay the actual cost of their education, it'd be much higher, even in Ivy League schools. Universities complement the tuition fees by getting public funding.

And (in theory, at least) tax money should be given for a good reason. The public as a whole does not care about the personal benefits that some would get by gaining a degree. That's the private interest of those people, and we're talking public good here: it should help all.

Tax money is given to universities so they would create inventions and innovations in science and art, which are in the public interest. And to create those we need well-educated people to invent and innovate.

Thus it's not the students buying education. That's a byproduct, and they're not the customer, just a beneficiary. It's the public buying educated people.

Of course, this is all pinko-think, and it's true that some academics are just old farts who keep wondering how dare those students interrupt the academics very important nap time, and who thought of letting students in campus anyway?

This may be all true. But then the public as a customer doesn't get what it's trying to buy.

If the students don't understand, how can they become educated?

Never said the public is getting his money worth.

Maybe that is where the analogy breaks down. But the argument is misused a lot to imply that the desires and needs of students are irrelevant, and that students' complaints are without merit, even if they can't understand their TA.

> If students had to pay the actual cost of their education, it'd be much higher, even in Ivy League schools.

That seems really unlikely. The fact that it's expensive to provide this exact bundle of services doesn't mean that's what would get provided without the subsidy. What's more likely is that the services that mean the least to the customers would get cut until the tuition was more reasonable. Without tax funding you'd get schools that were focused primarily on teaching. Like high school, but with more accomplished teachers.

And then we won't have research. So the material taught will stagnate, just like in high schools. If we treat students as customers, then they want the best -- so to improve, the student-oriented university would hire teachers that are also great researchers, so they'd have something new to teach, that isn't taught by the competition. And that research is costly; and we come full circle to the research-oriented universities.

How much does an undergraduate really learn that's from the latest research?

Not too much (and that's particularly true if you look at the older engineering disciplines.) The goal of an undergraduate education would be to learn how to learn.

I wish the full article were freely available, but there are some studies such as this one that suggest that the situation is not quite so cut-and-dry:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...

The basic result is that the belief that foreigners are hard to understand leads students to perceive them as poor lecturers. For example, if you play the same recorded lecture to a group of students, their perception of how easy it was to understand is affected by whether you project an image of a Caucasian or Indian/Chinese 'lecturer' at the front of the room.

I always wondered if a deaf or mute person could challenge the same rules that allowed incomprehensible people to lecture.

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