My attention was drawn to the controversy surrounding Professor Tiwari for two reasons.

First, I have had teachers from other countries whose accents occasionally gave me some difficulty. Second, there are three professors in my department from India, two of whom have accents that I had to adjust to, although doing so was not especially difficult.

Consequently, I decided to attend Professor Tiwari’s Statistics 208 class to see what the fuss was about. I atteneded her 2 p.m. lecture on Tuesday, April 24.

Professor Tiwari clearly has an accent, but it took me no more than about ten minutes of listening to her before I had mastered it. Not ten weeks, but only about ten minutes. The assertion that her accent makes her incomprehensible is simply ludicrous.

The only difficulty I had understanding her after the first ten minutes came from students carrying on conversations, something that is very difficult for a teacher to control in a large lecture hall.

I sat in the back row, on the right. Three students sat there conversing through the entire class, except when they dozed. Late in the class, one of them complained: “I don’t know what she’s talking about,” hardly surprising considering they had paid no attention to the lecture. A number of students spent the entire class reading the paper.

When I attended her class, I saw students trailing in up to 45 minutes late. It seems to me the complaints against Professor Tiwari are largely an excuse for students who are not working.

It is true that Professor Tiwari’s inexperience as a teacher shows. She speaks a little too fast, and she writes in script on her overhead projector, when printing would be more readily understandable.

It seems to me the issue here is not Professor Tiwari’s accent, but rather some students looking for an excuse for their unwillingness to do the work in the class. That the provost has not been more supportive of Professor Tiwari speaks poorly of him. The Student Association grandstanding in the case constitutes further evidence of its detrimental effect on the quality of the university.

William Sjostrom

Assistant Professor