Re: [seul-edu] Site@School V2.1 betatesters needed

[Donald J Christensen <djc@cisco.com>]

Hans Paijmans wrote:
> Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 16:47:37 -0500 (EST)
> > Hans Paijmans <j.j.paijmans@uvt.nl> wrote:
> >
> > Hans> Hans> I personally would feel more sympathy towards seul.org if 
> > they were
> > Hans> not so through-and-through American. They convey the distict 
> > feeling
> > Hans> that anything not origionated in the US of A is not worth very 
> > much.
> >
> >
> > Hans, we should not go in this trap and think that way. May be most
> > members of the Seu/Edu list are orginated from USA but I don't agree with
> > your statement.
>
> I  feel sad when I think of the americans that I like and the
> americans that I admire (possibly disjunct sets). But do not
> forget that I, an assistant professor on a dutch university
> will be forced to teach in english for a class of dutch students
> and to discuss the affairs of my faculty in english in a meeting
> of dutch staff members...
Who is forcing you and how are they doing it?

I have friends with graduate degrees in theoretical mathematics
that had to take Russian and/or German (can't remember which offhand)
language classes as part of their required classwork.  The reason was
because much of the research in their field was published in those
languages.  Were they offended because it happened that their field
of interest was established primarily by foreign language speakers?
No.

If you are upset about working in a field where research is published
and collaboration is done in the English language, you certainly should
not be angry at Americans.  Perhaps you should find a different field
that is dominated by a language more to your liking.

-Don

--
Don Christensen       Senior Software Development Engineer
djc@cisco.com         Cisco Systems, Santa Cruz, CA
  "It was a new day yesterday, but it's an old day now."