Teaching Business, English Writing and the Future of America

During the past 14 years I have taught at a number of higher education institutions around New York State. With one exception, at all of them an uncomfortably large percentage of the students’ writing skills have been weak. The one exception is a university in the elite decile of US News and World Report and the Gourman rankings.

During my earliest teaching job, at a private engineering college in upstate New York, I found that a significant percentage of students in the AACSB accredited business school (putting it in the top twenty percent of business schools) did not follow basic rules of grammar in their written work. I also found that there was considerable resistance to demanding coursework on the students' part, who were supported by the college's administration (that was eager for their tuition dollars). Like many colleges, this one evaluated professors on the basis of their student ratings and was indifferent to professors’ efforts to improve students’ writing skills if such efforts did not yield students' approbation on the students’ teacher appraisal forms. Such approbation was inevitably correlated with high grades, multiple choice tests and the professor’s giving away the questions on the tests in advance.

Now that I have tenure I have decided to encourage good writing. Doing so was contingent upon my securing immunity to administrative retaliation for good teaching. Although I am a business professor and am not formally trained as an English professor or writer, it is obvious that many of my students have never been asked to write carefully and that the elementary and high schools have not provided them with the basic writing skills that they need to succeed in business if they intend to work in “primary sector,” large corporations. Business programs have mostly avoided the problem by relying primarily on multiple choice tests.

Many of my students speak English as a second language, but many of the American-born students have weak English writing skills too. When I tell them that I grade assigned papers on the basis of writing as well as content and creativity, most students do not object. But some do.

One student last year wrote me an e-mail stating that my corrections to his writing were inappropriate and reflected “poor protocol” because a former professor had told him that his writing was good. Yesterday, a Russian-born student told me that it was not fair that I included an appraisal of his writing skill in the grade on his paper because my course was “not an English course” and he needed only to speak and write Russian on his job. He asked me whether including writing in my grading was “the right way to grade, or is it something just you do?” He said that it was not fair that I included writing in his grade because English is not his first language.

A student whose first language is not English is at a competitive disadvantage. At the same time, the transmission and requirement of communication skills ought to be an objective of higher as well as lower education, and one obligation of an American university is to ensure that its students are communicating competently in English.

I would add that my grading is generous, and no student received below a C on that assignment. In addition, several English-as-second-language students received A’s, even when their writing reflected weak English writing skill, because they showed improvement from prior assignments and/or their handling of the assigned work was exceptionally good.

The question the student asked, in an incensed tone, is whether it is legitimate for me to grade on the basis of writing skills in a business course. The fact that the student was incensed and felt it appropriate to question the legitimacy of teaching basic skills in an educational institution is consistent with a cynical entitlement culture that has become characteristic of higher education in the United States. The interest that the public has in the university's developing citizens who are competent in writing robust English is part of the reason for the subsidy that the public pays to universities in tax exemptions and direct subsidies.

Why should the public support the education of students who resent learning English? What role in this country’s future can such students play?