Grand Valley State University’s mission to greatly increase diversity among its faculty members by 2015 seems like a noble cause on the surface,
but there are some underlying student concerns that administration should keep in mind during the recruiting process.

On one hand, bringing in more foreign faculty members offers students a chance to experience cultural differences. This gives students a chance to expand their international view of the world and its different cultures, and in today’s increasingly interdependent society, fewer skills are more critical to employers than a graduate’s ability to successfully interact with people of different cultures and backgrounds.

As students graduate and get jobs, many will move away from what international professor Ki Deuk Hyun described as “homogeneous” West Michigan into areas that are more culturally and linguistically diverse, where having experience interacting and communicating with multicultural faculty can be invaluable. And for students without the time or the means to study abroad or travel extensively while in college, taking classes with international faculty can also serve as an accessible way to gain eye-opening new perspectives on the world without having to venture outside of the greater Grand Rapids area.

Not all international professors are created equal, however, and many of those benefits can easily be outweighed if the professor is not adapted to teaching in American classrooms. While many international professors offer unique insights on chosen fields, others can create obstacles in the classroom such as language barriers and challenging classroom formats, which can negatively impact a student’s academic success.

While diversity and intercultural competency are both valuable, even necessary, skills in today’s rapidly globalizing world, they should not come at the cost of a student’s ability to thrive in the classroom. Any international professor that the university hires in its effort to be more diverse should have the ability to be both enlightening and understandable without one taking away from the other. The ability for a professor to communicate effectively is just as, if not more, important as his or her ability to instruct.

The whole purpose of attending college is to learn and to soak up experiences, but if students cannot understand what is being presented, that experience is a waste.