Racist.

Heh.

Anyone else find it ironic that this is being addressed in Fargo?

What's so Ironic about that?

Rob--

Did you see the Coen Brothers movie? Fargo-ites have a pretty distinctive accent. I used to know a guy from Fargo, and he really did talk like the characters in the movie. He now lives in Germany, and he has the same accent in German, which sounds truly bizarre.

Utron- I'm from North Dakota. I went to college in Fargo. I live right in the middle of the state.

We don't talk like that. Well, maybe a little bit...but nowhere near what's depcited in that movie.

My freshman year (1988-89) at a well-regarded research school that is part of the Univ. of California system, I had a few math, chem, physics professors with thick Indian and Russian accents. That year, there was a cartoon in the school's humor newspaper depicting a student sitting in class, glassy-eyed, as a professor (race indeterminate, opaque glasses, goatee) spouted frame after frame of mathematical symbols resembling a blackboard in a Gary Larson cartoon, punctuated by the word TREE at random intervals, and the student looked more and more confused.

The hapless undergrad raised his hand and asked, 'Professor, I'm sorry, but could you please explain what TREE stands for?"

Professor: "Vot? You don't know Tree?" "Von .... two ... TREE!"

You wouldn't believe the uproar. For weeks, there was heated debate in the main campus paper over whether the cartoon was "racist" or not.

Again, you couldn't tell from the cartoon what race the Professor was -- the drawing looked probably more like Lenin with coke-bottle glasses than anything else. ("He's a normal white guy like us!" - oh ... whoops.) No matter. To the PC crowd, it was racist just the same. Was there room for argument that the cartoon was a valid commentary on whether professors with nearly-unintelligible accents make good classroom lecturers for halls full of 250 freshman pre-engineering students? Not to the PC crowd.

I think this episode of on-campus stupidity was one of the first things that provoked me to start questioning the silliness of the Left, and started me on my shift rightward. It came too late to prevent me from voting for Dukakis that year, but since the guy lost, I guess no harm really done by that move.

Ummmm.... Utron? It's called Fargo because that's where the initial crime occurs, but most of the movie takes place in Minnesota , which is the origin of those accents -- and even there, more so in the country than the cities. My wife's from Minnesota, and Like Rob, went to college in Fargo (UND, right Rob?), and those are Minnesota accents, not North Dakota.

NDSU. UND is in Grand Forks.

And North Dakota has pretty much the same accent as Minnesota and I still wouldn't say its as bad as the movie's.

My TA for CS 211 was of undetermined origiin. From somewhere between the Horn of Africa and Viet Nam. Worrying about the fact that I could barely understand his responses to my questions led me to:

1. Make sure my questions were clear and simple.
2. Listen hard and to request a different word or phrase to help explain his answer.
3. Always carry plenty of paper to clearly outline the problems I was trying to deal with. (Flow charts are pretty much universal).

One of my proudest grades was the A I received from a class that was so large that it met in the auditorium used for student movies. Only five percent of the students received an A.

And beyond the skill in learning top/down and bottom/up programming, I learned to have the patience necessary to get help from a man who knew how to teach...if you had the patience to learn. I used to hide my smirk when I heard other students complain about this particular TA. If you want to mope around looking for excuses, any one will do.

Excellent and very thoughtful points, OregonGuy. That is exactly the kind of useful discussion that never even got reached in the incident I cited at my university, because of all the noise that was made about the alleged racism / xenophobia that many perceived in the mere fact of someone's having raised the issue.

There's some analogy to be drawn to the current brouhaha over the Harvard chancellor's having speculated on whether differences in the sexes may account for some of the low representation of women in the sciences. According to some of his critics, his even having speculated on it is evidence of bias.

I once had a Physics professor who had such poor english that he could not understand us, never mind us trying to understand him. Whenever anyone asked a question, he would pick out one word he understood and talked about it, rarely answering what was asked. Of course, this is only my best guess of what he was doing, since I could only understand about 15% of what he said.

Furr and sex is den! is den!

an Indian math professor I had in juco.