Second-Order Change Without First-Order Change 73
employ foreign lecturers. In a university which employs foreign lecturers,
its programme administrator explained:
We use “farang” lecturers because although we were offering the same
programmes as other universities, they use mostly Thai lecturers. So we
wanted to create an image for our programme, and farang lecturers could
increase the popularity of our programme. If we had used Thai lecturers
like the others, there would have been no reason for students to come
to us. (Interview)The interview makes it clear that the university employed Western lecturers
as an important part of its marketing strategy to attract Thai students.
To many Thai students, it is important to be taught by Western lecturers
whose mother tongue is English. This is because the perception among
Thai students and society in general is that “international programmes”
function as a means to improve the students’ mastery of the English
language, and secondly to introduce Western culture. Interviews with
Thai students who studied in international programmes indicate that they
prefer farang professors to Thai or other Asian professors as the former
can provide better English or Western examples, and allow more open
discussions in the classroom. They outwardly equate being foreigners with
being Westerners. Amongst the other factors, American or European accents
are preferable compared to the Thai accent. The interviews elucidate that
the students’ perception of their international programmes depend largely
on the presence of farang academics in their educational experiences.
Thus there is a strong cultural preference, or bias, in favour of lecturers
from Europe and North America whose mother tongue is English for reasons
of accent and intonation. That English is valued as the premium language
is reiterated by an American lecturer in an international programme from
a Thai public university who said: “I think the most important benefit of
this programme is the English language. Students speak and write better
after they have graduated from us”. Students’ preference for European
and American lecturers are also reflected in the composition of academic
staff in the international programmes.
Table 3.2 shows the number of foreign and Thai lecturers in a Bachelor
of Business Administration (international programme) in a college during
the first semester of the 2014 academic year. The college has thirty-seven
lecturers for the semester out of which thirty-one are foreign lecturers. The
majority of foreign lecturers are adjunct or invited lecturers who teaches