re: Why do universities hire professors that students can't understand?

How can you learn from the professor if their use of English isn’t understood???

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We registered for classes over the phone with Reggie

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Yep, trying to actually get the call picked up was so frustrating. BUSY BUSY BUSY BUSY BUSY...I remember people saying that if you lived closer to the university, you had a better chance of getting in quicker. That makes no sense at all but we sure did it anyway.

The answer is research and potential to bring in grant money.

Revenue from undergraduate tuition typically gets spent on student services and administration. Thus, teaching isn't really a money-maker for big research universities, which is why they increasingly rely on contingent faculty -- i.e., non-tenure track faculty (i.e., instructors) and non-permanent faculty (i.e., adjuncts).

Grants are where the real money for the big research university -- most take ~50% (or more) of federal and foundation grants right off the top. Most people don't know that. For fields like biomedical research and engineering, this amounts to millions.

Thus, if a professor can bring in research dollars (or has the potential to), they don't really care if that professor can't teach well.

I spent 5 years in engineering at lsu and never had a problem understanding any of my professors.

There are two situations
1. The professor’s English is terrible and it’s truly unreasonable to expect someone to understand.
2. They have an “accent” but the command of the English language is reasonable.

I truly have sympathy in case 1. But most of the time it is case 2 and in this scenario, the student should make an effort to understand. In case 2, the student uses the “accent” as an excuse for laziness or failure.

When more than 50% of the class fails it points to #1.

Some of my favorite professors were hard to understand. But they wanted you to learn. It was statistics and Econ. I had a few white all American professors that could teach for shite and I understood every damn word they said.

I dropped a couple math classes where I couldn’t understand the prof

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shite, when I first got to tech, you had to stand in line. We skipped phone step and went straight to internet registration


I don't really remember when we had internet registration but maybe not at all during my first degree from LSU. You had to just sit on the phone and hit redial for an hour or two until you got through.

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You missed out on the color coded mainframe computer punch cards after wandering around half of campus (multiple buildings anyway). Engineering was one color, English another, Math a 3rd color...taking a ton of classes per quarter @Tech you'd have a rainbow of cards to turn in at the end of about a 3 hour or longer walkabout.

Not advertised was the trading cards among students to coordinate professors, times, days of the week. "I'll trade ya my Lime Green Thursdays for your Dark Red Tuesdays if you'll throw in your Dark Blue Monday afternoon".