I ran into some interesting papers and essays on the issue of English as the lingua franca of contemporary higher education and science. They raise serious questions about the preservation of ‘scientific languages’, the ability to learn and teach in a non-native language, the homogenising tendencies of a lingua franca and even about flexible interpretation of plagiarism…

Some time ago, biophysicist Stefan Klein wrote an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine about languages and science (Dümmer auf Englisch; English translation here: Dumber in English). Klein wants to ensure the future of German as a language of science and presents some good arguments for it. Roughly, his argument is that the move towards English as a lingua franca makes science elitist and (non native English speaking) scientists dumber. For the first issue Klein refers to a seminar he attended:

All the speakers – six Germans, plus three from the United States and one from Great Britain – were outstanding. And they all spoke either English or, in the case of a German speaker, now and then something similar. But who in the audience spoke English? No one. (…) As someone from the sponsoring foundation told me, of course it would be better if the local guests would simply speak German. This would increase the public resonance. But the professors had another idea. Their argument: People only take a conference seriously when English is the official language.

Klein doesn’t plea for abandoning English as a language for German science but argues that scientists should be accountable to the public: “how do they expect to win the sympathy of a public with which they no longer even have language in common?” He claims that German should remain the language for seminars and lectures. At the same time, the communication media for the experts and specialists can be in English. Klein:

It shouldn’t hurt German scientific language if, in the course of everyday research, publications appear in English. Such articles almost always deal with tiny advances in knowledge – like the question of whether or not gene X is expressed under the influence of protein Y. They are oriented towards a small audience, they seldom influence scientific concepts and they are, even if composed by native speakers, usually linguistically as outstanding as a manual for a DVD player.

In relation to the second issue, Klein refers to researchers in Sweden and the Netherlands who found that “we are dumber in English”. Test results were about ten percent lower on average in English taught courses than in courses taught in the mother tongue.

In English seminars, students ask and answer fewer questions; they give the overall impression of being somewhat more helpless. Neither students nor teachers are generally aware of the problem, because they all overestimate their expertise in English.

By now, English is the sole language used in lectures in 250 out of 1,976 advanced educational fields in Germany (“master’s degree” programmes). Should this development continue, it would mean certain death for German as a language of research. In Sweden’s most renowned university, in Uppsala, they already are considering offering more programmes in Swedish or returning completely to the mother tongue for basic studies.

In continental Europe – and especially Northwestern Europe – you can see a trend where more and more Master’s programmes are taught in English. This of course facilitates international mobility (and the attraction of full fee paying non EU foreign students) and it equips graduates with a global language, something that is especially important in the more globalised, small countries in northern Europe. On the other hand I share the worries of Klein about the disadvantages of learning (and teaching!) in a non-native language. But this issue can partially be solved by improving English teaching, introducing English in early stages of education and by immersing children with the English language at a young age. In my opinion, all this doesn’t necessarily negatively affect the use of the native language.

Clearly, the necessity to become fluent in English becomes less when the native language is widely spoken. The risks of loosing German (or French and Spanish) as a language of science is far less than the risk of loosing Dutch or Swedish as a language of science. First of all there’s simply more users of the language, creating more opportunities for using it as a language of academic communication and publishing. Secondly, small languages are often spoken in small countries, which again are more pushed towards the use of English in other sectors of public life, especially in business.

Another interesting essay on the issue comes from Phillip Altbach from the Center for International Higher Education. He addresses some additional downsides of The Imperial Tongue, and especially the homogenising tendencies related to it:

• The impact of English increases the influence of the major English-speaking academic systems, particularly of the United States and the United Kingdom.
• The use of national languages and the existence of national journals and publishers are called into question by policymakers and academic administrators worldwide. Knowledge is ranked according to whether it is recognized by the international academic community or not. Topics such as local history or research on local health problems may be ignored to gain recognition internationally.
• Countries might lose its distinctive culture if the native language is no longer used for intellectual and academic life. If the knowledge that is most valued is aimed at the international academic world and is communicated in English, there will be negative implications for national scientific and intellectual systems.
• In many countries, academic rewards of all kinds accrue to those using English and participating in global scientific networks. These scholars are typically invited to international conferences, awarded research funds by both international and national funders, and are generally seen as leaders of their scientific communities. However, again, this offers privileges to those who produce their work in English and intend to reach an international audience.
• These factors will tend to orient researchers and scholars to themes that they feel will appeal to an international audience, often at the expense of essential but more parochial themes that might be of interest only to local or national audiences.
• These factors lead to homogenizing knowledge worldwide. Not only is English the dominant language, but its relationship with the controlling trends in international science and scholarship is a powerful combination of forces contributing to decreasing diversity of themes and methodologies.

The use of English as a lingua franca and the tendency towards homogenisation is especially apparent in online distance education. In a paper in the Higher education Quarterly (Don’t leave me hanging on the Anglophone), Simon Marginson discusses the failure of English language global e-learning. Among other things, he argues that for exporting universities, the potential of cross-border online education can only be realised if communications are customised for cultural and linguistic variations.

In his paper, Marginson focuses especially on the Asia Pacific region. The problematic point here is of course that students demand the use of English, especially because it becomes more widely spoken in everyday business life in this region, especially in Malaysia, Singapore, India and the Philippines (and increasingly also in Indonesia or China). This might create a paradox where the more the programmes become customised for cultural and linguistic variations, the less ‘marketable’ they become.

An interesting additional issue related to academic publishing recently came to the fore in Nature. For native English speakers it is not just easier to write in correct English, but also to use the language in an esthetic and artistic way. This point might be even more true for the social sciences and humanities than for the natural sciences, life sciences and engineering. But nonetheless, this response to an accusation of plagiarism in Nature struck me:

The accusations made by arXiv that my colleagues and I have plagiarized the works of others, reported in your news story ‘Turkish physicists face accusations of plagiarism‘ (Nature 449, 8) are upsetting and unfair.

It’s inappropriate to single out my colleagues and myself on this issue. For those of us whose mother tongue is not English, using beautiful sentences from other studies on the same subject in our introductions is not unusual. I imagine that if all articles from specialist fields of research were checked, similarities with other texts and papers would easily be found. In my case, I aimed to cite all the references from which I had sourced information, although I may have missed some of them.

Borrowing sentences in the part of a paper that simply helps to better introduce the problem should not be seen as plagiarism. Even if our introductions are not entirely original, our results are — and these are the most important part of any scientific paper.

In the current climate of ‘publish or perish’, we are under pressure to publish our findings along with an introduction that reads well enough for the paper to be published and read, so that our research will be noticed and inspire further work.

And it’s not just the academic community that is wrestling with the language problem. The ubiquitous use of English in the global economy raises many new issues as well, as shown by this Wall Street Journal article.

As a European, my view on the relation between the university and sports is very straightforward. There’s a health related function and a social function: the university provides facilities for students and staff to stay in shape and stay in touch. Simple as that!

As a European in Australia, the prominence of athletics on campus surprised me in the early days when I got here (I’m pretty much surrounded by ovals and tennis courts). But then again, sports are pretty much part of everyday life here (especially the past few weeks) and obviously, that’s reflected in campus life.

In the United States, this relation is taken a step further. And not without controversy. Escalating coaches’ salaries and the long-term bonded debt required to finance new arenas, stadiums, and other capital projects have a growing number of university leaders worried that college sports might not be as financially sound as it appears. Many academics are getting increasingly frustrated as well by the fact that universities overspend on sports at a time when its academic programs are deteriorating from financial starvation.

I was well aware of the importance of athletics at US campuses and the controversy surrounding it. But still, I was amazed by the excessive spending reported in this article about the University of Texas in the Statesman (thanks to the CCAP Blog).

Here are some figures:

• This year, the University of Texas athletics department will for the first time spend more than $100 million. That’s double the amount of just six years ago.
• The $107.6 million budget for UT’s athletics program which consists of 511 athletes, averages $211,000 per athlete.

• Spending on local hotel rooms for the players at home games: $20,000 per player
• The athletic department this year will pay $1.79 million—- $450,000 for the football team alone — to tutor and assist athletes with their class work.
• UT pays $32,000 a year on “quality control” — essentially football dorm supervisors who help the coaches.
• Every year the athletic department charters about 20 flights, at approximately $90,000 each, from Continental Airlines.

• $200,000 was spent in 2005 on renovating the football locker room

• When the Longhorn football team won the 2005 national championship, it was invited to the White House. The athletic department picked up the tab — $143,000, plus $19,000 for lunch.
• Darrell K. Royal-Memorial Stadium is in the midst of a $175 million rehab eight years after a $90 million upgrade; the baseball stadium is getting a $26 million facelift. The golf teams play out of a new $1.5 million clubhouse on a course that just got a $500,000 upgrade.
• Following its Rose Bowl victory, the football team was rewarded with a $200,000 renovation of its players lounge, a retreat with four TV projectors (screens drop from the ceiling at the push of a button embedded in a six-foot replica of the UT tower), six flat screen TVs, four X-boxes and three PlayStations.
• …and the lists goes on….

Jim Coleman, over at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, compares it with the University’s academic expenditures:

Prima facie, the athletic spending at UT looks fairly high, especially when broken down into per athlete expenditures, but what really makes these numbers pop out is how they compare to UT’s academic expenditures. For the 2006-2007 school year, UT had a core academic budget of 974 million dollars. This money funded salaries, building maintenance, utilities, scholarships, and basically everything else needed to provide the students with the academic resources they needed.

Dividing the academic expenditures by the number of enrolled students for that year, 49,697; yields an average academic expenditure per student of $19, 598; a paltry sum when compared to athletic expenditures per athlete.

Clearly, the priority of athletics over academic issues becomes apparent in the graph below. And considering the relative increase in budgets, it is likely to be continued.

Perverted priorities? I think so indeed. Of course the athletics department is a major source of income and prestige for universities as well, but in this case, every sense of proportionality is lost. Or is that just my European sobriety at work…

While walking through Darling Harbour yesterday – visiting the Fiesta Festival – I had a look at the Earth From Above exhibition by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. Some of you might have already seen it since the exhibition has been traveling around the world the past years. I thought it was pretty amazing…

Below are a few of my favorites. Click on the pictures to see the larger versions and the stories that go with them, or go here to see them all.

Worker resting on bales of cotton, Thonakaha, Korhogo, Ivory Coast:

Freeway Interchange near the Port of Yokohama, Honsu, Japan:

Islet in the terraced rice fields of Bali, Indonesia:

Abandoned City of Pripiat near the Nuclear Power Plant at Chernobyl:

Questions of Members Wilders and Bosma for the Deputy Minister of Education, Culture and Sciences, Mrs. Bijsterveldt-Vliegenthart about Halal-meals during a school outing of an ROC (ROC stands for Regional Vociational Schools):

1. Are you aware that students of the ROC Amsterdam were only served halal meat during their school outing and that this is confirmed by the ROC?
2. Do you share the opinion that halal meat should not be a main component of a meal at a school outing of a Dutch school?
3. Do you share the opinion that the muslims at our schools should adapt to the Dutch norms and values and not the other way around? If not, why not?
4. Who will be responsible for the additional costs of the (more expensive) halal meat?
5. What do you plan to do in order to prevent students from being forced into a halal barbecue?
6. How will you deal with the ROC Amsterdam?

For people who think this is a joke: unfortunately IT’S NOT! This is apparently what really matters in Dutch education, according to Geert Wilders and his disciples.

Let’s raise the dikes, close the gates, shut down the kebab joints, pizzerias and noodlehouses and enjoy the brussels sprouts and meatbals!

Not many blog posts these days…and that won’t change too much in the next few weeks. I’m working hard to finish two papers for two conferences next month in Austria and Ireland. Before the conferences, I’ll be in the Netherlands for a few weeks.

And talking about the Netherlands… During my frequent short term writer’s blocks I stumbled upon this video called “Sex, Drugs and Democracy”, a documentary about the liberal nature of Dutch society. At least…. the way it was in 1994. It starts with the usual stuff. By now, everyone probably heard about the sex and the drug policies in the Netherlands, so skip that.

A small part – related to society and politics – is actually quite interesting. When I watched the part I thought I was watching a video from the 1980s. And that was not only because of the hairdo (I did know our hair in the eighties was rather ridiculous, but apparently the same goes for the nineties). This part of the documentary illustrates how a society can change in just over 10 years. I’m sure that the movie is rather one-sided even for that time. But still, it’s been a long time since I have seen Dutch people being so proud about:

• the fact that they are (were?) so equal
• the fact that they have (had?) a very progressive tax system
• the fact that they live (lived?) in a ‘soft society’
• the fact that they are (were?) so tolerant
• the fact that colour doesn’t (didn’t!) matter in Dutch society

Yes…things have changed. Most of those views are now considered idealistic or politically correct. Politics is now about excellence, profit, competition, cultural superiority and ‘them and us’. Don’t get me wrong. I still like the country. But not all things change for the better.

The video below starts at the point where the interesting part begins. Watch the following seven minutes or so. After that they return to the drugs and stuff. The whole video is here.

Cultural orientation toward the future differs between countries and strongly correlates with the level of competitiveness of the country. That was one of the findings of Mansour Javidan and his colleagues in the Project GLOBE (see this month’s issue of the Harvard Business Review). Since 1993, the project examines the inter-relationships between societal culture, organizational culture, and organizational leadership. Through a survey of over 17,000 middle managers in 61 societies, they found clear international differences in several areas, one of them being “future orientation”.

Their study finds that the Singaporeans have the most future oriented culture. Singapore is followed by Switzerland, the Netherlands and Malaysia. Russia, Poland, Hungary and Argentina were least future oriented. As the graph above shows (click to enlarge), there is a strong correlation between the level of competitiveness (based on the World Economic Forum rankings). In addition correlations were found for factors like GDP per capita, level of innovativeness, happiness and confidence.

The article does not say anything about the causal relationships between culture orientation and these factors…

On 8 January, at the 375th birthday (Dies Natalis) of the University of Amsterdam, University Professor Louise Fresco gave the annual anniversary speech (Dies rede) to the university community. Unfortunately, the address is only available in Dutch. With the risk of totally mutilating and distorting Fresco’s brilliant style of writing, I want to share a few (translated) passages of her magnificent speech. In her address, Louise Fresco reported about research that was done by Dr. Hakim Sarastro of the University of Oeloemia. Part of Dr. Sarastro’s research on European higher education was conducted in Amsterdam(*). Fresco cites frequently from the letters that Sarastro sent to his colleagues in Oeloemia.

In his first letter(**), Sarastro starts on a positive and hopeful note:

“Dear Friends, finally I am in Europe, birthplace of western science! I feel like a traveler whose thirst will finally be quenched. Where better than in this continent, where the university was invented, can we test whether we are heading in the right direction at home in Oeloemia.”

By the time Hakim Sarastro gets to his eighth letter, there seem to appear more and more signs of desperation:

“Friends! In Oeloemia, the university is a place where students in small groups and together with their teachers, learn what science is, where research demands the highest personal dedication and where only the best professors – by rotation – as deans take comprehensible decisions about the academic directions.”

(…)

“The confusion and dissatisfaction here, prove that systems of equity representation and participation do not lead to courageous decisions. National politicians refuse to put the money where their mouth is, the management of universities is paralyzed by internal struggles and lack of resources, and the professors… ah, they’ll go their own way. There is no Universitas here, no desire to jointly shape a university.”

(…)

“This is, my friends, the sad ending of a grand tradition that, from Bologna, via Coimbra, Paris, Heidelberg and Cambridge led to the nice European promises of Lisbon. Does this mean the end of the university? Will she implode because of the increasing bureaucratic pressures from within and from outside, and the centrifugal forces of market oriented research that is destroying the classical faculties? Will the university go to pieces because of a lack in leadership or because of the increasing student numbers? However things may be in Amsterdam, my dearest friends, we in Oeloemia need to go forward! Because he who saves one university, saves them all!”

Dr. Sarastro ends his last letter with the following passage:

_________
(*) Sarastro, H. Letters from My Travels Searching for Universal Serendipity, the case of the University of Amsterdam (English summary). University of Oeloemia, Sunpower Press, Oeloemia, 2006. Circulation restricted.

(**) In an end note to the speech, Louise Fresco reveals her real source of inspiration: Lettres persanes by Montesquieu (Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu), anonymously published in Amsterdam in 1721. Montesquieu is such an inspiring character because he was interested in – and experienced in – all sciences, from philosophy to physics. The name Sarastro does not come from the Lettres persanes, but of course refers to the keeper of the Temple of Wisdom in Mozart’s Zauberflote. Fresco has named him Hakim (‘the wise man’). Oeloemia is a name made up by Fresco, coming from ‘Uluum’, the Arabic word for Sciences.

Some of Sarastro’s words come directly from Montesquieu. In other instances, Fresco has added some words from Persian poetry (from Thackston, W.M.: A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry: A Guide to the Reading & Understanding of Persian Poetry from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, 1994 Ibex Publishers, Bethesda (MD)). The comparison with the barking dog (Letter V) comes from a speech by Adlai Stevenson from the University of Wisconsin (in 1952: ‘If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain’).
_________

[With thanks to ScienceGuide for pointing me to the speech. The full speech, in Dutch, can be found here]

Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006) passed away last Sunday (30 April).

For me, his numerous books, short stories and essays are the most remarkable works I have ever read. Both his use of language and his choice of topics make that his books and stories portray a lively picture of Indonesian societies and cultures. Toer brought history to live, from the early Majapahit kingdom to the first stages of colonialism, from the first movements towards independence to the repression of the Suharto regime. I wrote a short post on is work before. Here is my top 5 of his work:

1. Gadis Pantai (The Girl from the Coast, 1962)
2. Buru Quartet: Bumi Manusia (Earth of Mankind, 1980); Anak Semua Bangsa (Child of all Nations, 1980); Jejak Langkah (Footsteps, 1985) and Rumah Kaca (The Glass House, 1988)
3. Korupsi (1954)
4. Keluarga Gerilya (The Guerrilla Family, 1950)
5. Arus Balik (1995)

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Karel Appel (1921-2006) passed away last Wednesday in Zurich.

Appel was probably the best known contemporary Dutch painter. He was one of the founders of the COBRA group, a group of painters from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, allied with abstract expressionism.

—-

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) passed away on Saturday 29 April.

From the Economist:

“At six foot eight, he was a giant. Intellectually he was equally towering, a man who spent more than seven decades either on the stage of American public policy – as a bureaucrat in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a confidante of John Kennedy and adviser to countless other Democrats – or loudly lambasting Washington from offstage left, as a Harvard professor.”

And a well known quote:

“There are two classes of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know”

His latest book, Jalan Raya Pos (The Great Post Road) was published in 2005. As far as I know it is only available in Bahasa Indonesia but hopefully there will be a translation soon (otherwise I guess I’ll have to repolish my language skills and read it in Indonesian). The book is about a major highway 1,000 kilometers across the north coast of Java by the Dutch governor General Herman Willem Daendels, in the early 19th century.

The government of Thailand has blocked access in that country to the Web site of Yale University Press. The move is in response to the site’s publicity material for The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej, a book in which the author criticizes the king of Thailand.The government will also ban importation of the biography, which Yale is to publish in July. At various times after an initial blockage of the Web site earlier this month, parts of it were viewable within Thailand. Now access is fully censored, with a notice that reads: This Web site has been blocked by Cyber Inspector, the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology.

• English language speakers are still the largest language group on the internet with around 300 million users. The English language domination however is far less than in 2001, mainly due to the growth of Chinese and Japanese speaking/writing internet users (see graph).

• While in 1998, web pages were still dominantly in English, also this has decreased. In 1998, 75% of all web pages were in English, in 2003 this was around 45%. The ‘other’ in the graph must be mainly Chinese.

A simple search for “internet” (for specific languages) gives the following results:

2,160,000,000      English pages for “internet”
61,300,000           French pages for “internet”
53,900,000           German pages for “internet”
36,500,000           Spanish pages for “internet”
14,400,000           Dutch pages for “internet”
11,700,000           Portuguese pages for “internet”

I have been posting about this topic before. It is not that I am against the establishments of foreign branch campuses and neither are these posts meant to criticise Singapore’s desire to attract foreign universities. However I do think there needs to be some more transparency (especially in the case of public universities) and more balance between financial interests and public or academic interests. The UNSW is a good and well respected university, but I would expect some better arguments for their decisions. Here are a few of them:

• Professor Ingleson said he had been assured by the Government there that students and academics would enjoy complete academic freedom on campus. He dismissed concerns raised by the Warwick pull-out, arguing that UNSW had “a more nuanced view of how Singapore and its society worked”.




• “There is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech in any country … in that sense, our staff and our students will be subject … off-campus to the laws of Singapore like anyone else”.




• Professor Ingleson believed Warwick’s decision was based on financial risk rather than concern about academic freedom. He said UNSW was not exposed to the same risk as Warwick because the Australian university had closer ties with the region and a more firmly established brand name.