Stop the language restrictions in higher education!

May 17, 2012

So much for Wirtschaft

Recently, I attended a ‘Wirtschaftskonferenz’ in Antwerp (Belgium), a meeting between policy makers, academia and industry captains of North Rhine-Westphalia and Flanders. The things they discussed were rather obvious: joining efforts regarding energy, sustainable chemistry, logistics, a.s.o. I agree, it does make sense. It wasn’t really an exciting conference, though. To be frank, it was actually a bit dull.

However, there were a few things that caught my attention. For starters, Mr. Voigtsberger, (take a breath) Minister of Economic Affairs, Energy, Building, Housing and Transport of North Rhine-Westphalia, simply was not capable of addressing his international public in English. “He just can’t...”, someone whispered in my ear. I was quite flabbergasted, to be honest. And then, even more to my suprise, a bit later I found myself listening to what should have been an English speech of our own minister president of the Flemish government, Mr. Peeters. In retrospect, I’d rather call it Flenglish...

18.33% – are you serious?

Who am I to rant on these two regional leaders, not being capable of expressing themselves in decent English? Normally, I wouldn’t care too much. I admit, I also have my imperfections. However, recently, a draft af the new decrete on higher education in Flanders became public. And because of this, I cannot but rant.

For a long time, the entire university and university college community has been looking forward to a more liberal language legislation in higher education. Currently, we may only teach in a foreign language to a limited degree. For a bachelor’s programme the limit has been set very explicitly to 10% of the courses of a bachelor programme. Even more, the students have the right to be examined in Dutch (our native language).

The new legislation will set the limits at 18.33% for a bachelor’s programme and 50% of a master’s programme and puts more clamps (I will not discuss for brevity’s sake) that will hinder our fresh masters in their English mastery. Eighteen point thirty three? Who makes up these numbers?! I cannot but assume that the numbers probably correspond to the average quality of English spoken by our Flemish parliamentarians.

At the same time, the policy makers have a mouth full on Erasmus (now being promoted under the LLL umbrella), international experience, globalisation, open innovation, ...

Seriously, my beloved leaders, if we want to be a worldclass region by 2020 (Flanders in Action!), we’ll have to do better than talking about these things. You could start by stopping (no PUN intended) to impose these absurd paternalistic rules on our academic institutions. Our academic institutions are paid according to the number of credits obtained by their students. They won’t be tempted to create English elitist programmes only.

You cannot afford not to be...

Some boilerplate story to illustrate my point. when I finished my PhD, in 2002, I started a company with a couple of companion grad-students. To complete the team with some business experience, we extended the team with a Canadian with Italian roots and a Dane, living in Switzerland. After a couple of months, we hired a Czech and a Frenchman. We visited prospective customers in Japan, America, France, Germany, Switzerland, ... I happily spoke Dutch to my wife and kids, but all the brainstorming on new features answering the needs of customers, the architecture drafting, the discussions on technical implementation details were in English. You can’t afford not to be fluent in English.

I’m ready to admit that these extreme situations are more likely to occur in high tech engineering businesses, than in not for profit companies that provide services to the local community.

Return on investment

In these economically hard times with budgets being under pressure, investments by the government should be chosen carefully. Trusting the university’s common sense and brains on language matters doesn’t cost us anything. Instead, every euro spent in the process of discussing whether it should be 10, 18.33 or 50% is another euro wasted, yielding zero return on investment.

Please

English fluency is key to the prosperity and the well being of our entire planet let alone our Flemish region. Please, stop meddling with this key factor.