CORRECTION APPENDED: This story said Business School sophomore Eric Brackman found his economics GSI's accent difficult to understand. Brackman was speaking about his physics lab GSI.
The same story omitted English Language Institute lecturer Elizabeth Axelson's first name and the photo caption gave the wrong name to the English Language Institute.

Like many students at the University, Business sophomore Eric Brackmann can't understand his graduate student instructor.

Brackmann tried to understand his physics lab GSI's accent, but he found communication "impossible."

"I just gave up," Brackmann said.

Now Brackmann lets his mind wander during class.

"I tend to zone out for about the first 10 minutes as the GSI speaks," he said.

Experiences like Brackmann's have become increasingly common in the new, global world of higher education. With an increase in the number of international graduate student instructors at the University, administrators have dealt with an upswing in complaints from students saying their GSIs don't speak English fluently.

Scott Kassner, a student advisor for the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, said at least one student per semester asks him for advice about a GSI the student can't understand. But unrest about accents is more significant than that number indicates, he said.

"They might not be bringing it to our office, but we hear it and it happens," he said.

Many students will drop out of a class or switch to another section of the same class if they find the GSI too hard to understand. Some stay in the class. Some mock the GSI's speech and treat the experience as an unpleasant rite of passage. And some actually learn more than they signed up for.

In a world where many occupations require employees to be able to understand people from other countries, understanding people from different areas is increasingly important. While a student might be able to avoid taking a class with an international GSI now, they might regret that decision when they're working for a Chinese-owned company with co-workers who didn't grow up in the Midwest.

For many, however, the prospect of sitting in a corporate board room trying to figure out what everyone else is saying isn't as frightening as failing calculus.

One solution would be to forbid non-native English speakers from teaching classes, or on an individual level, to make sure all your GSIs speak English well. To quite a few students, that doesn't seem like a terrible idea.

It is.

Those who stay will be champions

While some students give up when confronted with a hard-to-understand GSI, others learned from the struggle. Although it made the class harder, it taught them how to communicate with people who don't speak English clearly.

LSA sophomore Corinne Charlton said she had trouble understanding her foreign economics and calculus GSIs at first but eventually learned to communicate with them.

"It forced me to pay attention, so it could be seen as a good thing," Charlton said. "Eventually, I could figure out what they were saying."

Many intro-level science and math courses at the University are taught by GSIs rather than by professors because it allows for smaller, more intimate classes where students can interact with their teachers, said mathematics lecturer Karen Rhea.

All six GSIs currently teaching recitation sections for Mathematics 216 are international GSIs.

Science and math classes tend to elicit the most complaints about hard-to-understand GSIs because the classes are more difficult. Students will often blame their problems on an international GSI to avoid blaming themselves, Kassner said.

"Let's say a student is having trouble in calculus," the LSA student advisor said. "Is that difficulty in calculus because of the way the GSI is speaking or is that because calculus is tough?"

Kassner said international GSIs are an important element of a modern undergraduate education because they expose students to diverse cultures and accents.

"One of the great advantages of being at a university like the University of Michigan is that you get to encounter people from all over the world," Kassner said. "Students should ask themselves, 'What can I learn from this person?"

Not trying can be a form of racism.

Soft Racism

Mocking international GSIs and blaming them for communication problems remains seen as largely acceptable on campus, even though other forms of discrimination are increasingly taboo.

The Every Three Weekly, a campus satire publication, published an article making fun of foreign professors called "North Campus Adopts Bloken Engrish As Official Language" last month.

"Engineers, we all in same boat, and boat take you across watel, and watel is ranguage," the article read. "Is a metaphol. Okay? Metaphol?"

Linguistics Prof.