While the irony of the xenophobic resolution passed by Marquette Unversity Student Government, as reported by the Tribune on March 3, being in the same edition as the editorial "Diversity could shine new light on foreign languages," did not escape me, I was much less amused by the contents of the article itself. Being an international student and a teaching assistant, I find the recommendation that was passed to be discriminatory, ill thought out and insulting. Having lived in or visited seven countries on three continents in my life, I am happy to say that I find the people of the United States to be one of the friendliest and most welcoming that I know. Thus, seeing a resolution that so blatantly targets a community at an institution as respected as Marquette is both surprising and sad.

I make three claims about the resolution, first is it is discriminatory. One only has to look at the definition of discriminatory to agree with me here. Discrimination is defined as, "Treatment or consideration based on class or category rather than individual merit."

The second claim that I make is that such a proficiency test is ill thought out. As an institution, we ought to be measuring the instructors' ability to effectively communicate knowledge. I support the need for people to be good at communicating ideas, but ability of international students to speak English is the wrong yardstick to measure the overall ability for TAs and professors to communicate with their students. Personally, I would always prefer someone who can make me understand math or science over someone who speaks good English but is unable to do math. Moreover, are we willing to fire a French teacher if they cannot speak English fluently? Even within the United States we have numerous accents and people with different speaking abilities. The movie "Fargo" became a hit as much because of its amusing portrait of accents in North Dakota as because of its murder mystery. Is the next MUSG resolution going to be to not hire any TA who has a Bronx or Bostonian accent or of hiring a TA who stutters while speaking? A much more acceptable resolution would have been to give greater import to teacher and TA evaluations, for all TAs and all teachers, not restricted to one group.

The third claim that I make about the resolution is that it's downright insulting. Are we seriously considering making professors who have been with the university for 10 or more years take a test of spoken English just because they happen not to be American? If the political science department wanted to hire Kofi Annan, would we make him take a test before we offered him a position?

I would like to close this comment by restating my belief that as an institution we ought to strive to have all out instructors be good communicators, good mentors and good motivators. Measuring speaking ability and that too on a narrow minority, international students takes focus away from the real issue. Quoting the Chinese philosopher, Chuang Tsu: "Words exist because of the meaning. Once you've got the meaning, you can forget the words."

Anirban Ghosh is a graduate student and teaching assistant in the department of mathematics, satistics and computer science.

This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on Mar. 15 2005.