Teaching effectiveness, as the testimony at trial indicated, is an
elusive concept [citations omitted] (evaluation of teaching ability [is]
necessarily [a] matter of judgment). Teaching effectiveness does,
however, include the ability to communicate the content of a
discipline, a quality which should be carefully evaluated at any
college or university.
(ibid.)There was never any discussion of factual, non-prejudicial assessment of
Dr. Hou’s communicative competence or intelligibility. The defense
depended exclusively on anecdotal evidence provided by the defendant,
and this satisfied the court.
No steps were taken to isolate potentially legitimate reasons from the
discriminatory ones. In an earlier chapter we looked at the studies which
examined the way foreign accents are heard in an educational setting
(Atagi 2003; Gluszek and Dovidio 2010; Kang and Rubin 2009; Katz et al.
2009).^23 In a thorough review of studies on accent discrimination in
education, Fought (2006) assembles the evidence to establish that the
mind is capable of manufacturing accents where none exist, a phenomenon
she calls accent hallucination. Her conclusion was that it is “possible for
expectations about language and ethnicity to override the actual linguistic
nature of an individual speech in the minds of hearers” (ibid.: Chapter
9.6).
Kang and Rubin (2009) look at this from a slightly different but
complementary angle.
If Hou’s attorney had been aware of this academic work and presented it
to the court, there might have been a closer examination of Hou’s
situation. In the end it is possible that his lecture style was the problem,
but the tone of some of the student evaluations of his performance makes
it clear that without further research, there was no way to be sure Hou
wasn’t being discriminated against on the basis of his national origin.
Lawyers interested in Title VII language-focused cases have been
debating how to ameliorate the kind of questionable evidence that was
used by Hou’s employers:
[T]he first step in remedying this injustice and making it easier for
plaintiffs to win foreign accent discrimination cases is to have courts