Hi Siri,

I teach in a Business School that is realizing the need to enhance the global literacy of our students so that they will be competitive when they enter the business world -- most likely on the management track in a multinational corporation. Unfortunately, our campus does not offer our students (most of which hail from New Jersey within a few miles of our university) much in the way of racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, national origin, or class diversity. The faculty is almost as homogeneous as the student body with a few notable exceptions such as myself.

So, how will we tackle the problem of "multicultural education" in the Business School? Like I said, the Business School at least realizes that it is selling its business students short in this insular environment; so it is exploring possibilities such as bringing Chinese scholars to campus as visiting professors and also trying to recruit students from China.

Are we also offering Chinese language training or any language training, for that matter, to our business students? Believe it or not, we just added an "International Business" major to our curriculum and the major has no language requirement. The Administration decided to let the students vote on whether there should be a foreign language requirement (seriously, the students) in the major. Of course, the students voted not to have a language requirement; and our school believes that, "The customer is always right."

So, Siri, I envy you since Australia at least pays "lip service" to Bilingualism. The consensus at our Business School is that everyone should speak English (preferably with an American accent).

Seriously Bitter,

Gwen