mind your language

The official medium of instruction at our university is Arabic, though the use of English is encouraged. I have no figures, but my guess is around half the faculty are Saudis. Among the non-Saudis, most are Egyptians and there are some Syrians as well. We belong to a tiny minority who are linguistically handicapped. We use English in the class room. The students endure us with blank faces (well, some of them, if not most). A senior South Asian colleague advised me not to take any exams in the graduate course that I have been assigned, because he’s afraid the entire class would fail. He suggested awarding grades based on assignments instead.

But assignments they submit are often little more than a collage of cut-and-pasted documents. Another colleague told me that he once found a term paper liberally sprinkled with chunks of German passages. The student didn’t even notice the language of the document he was copying from.

Yet another colleague once tested the students by switching to his native tongue (not English or Arabic) in the middle of a lecture. There was no reaction among the students.

Saudi Arabia is probably the only place in the world where university professors deliver three-hour lectures to classrooms packed with attentive furniture. Education here is not coeducational, and within the same university, there are separate facilities for girl students. If the instructor is male, the girl students sit behind a screen, out of his sight. The girls are smart enough and often quietly slip out of class instead of sitting through three hours of gibberish