Can the Language of Power and Privilege “Glass Ceiling” Be Broken for Scholarly Writing in a Second Language?

• In Event: Asian/American Women Navigating Academia: Challenges, Opportunities, and New Perspectives

Abstract

If you are a minority in academia, Strike One. If you are female, Strike Two. If you are a language minority, Strike Three. Three strikes, and you are supposed to be out of the game. The situations that language minority faculty face in higher education institutions are highly complex, yet, the simplification of such phenomena with the message of “the more you write, the better it gets!” will only perpetuate the institutional/organizational hurdles and biases for them.

Language minorities are viewed as deficient of the very language necessary for scholarly communications (Firth, 2009). Weedon (1997) once said that when we acquire language we use it to give “voice” to what we know and experience (p. 32), yet, the language that language minority faculty possess is not exactly the right kind (Firth, 2009). In other words, the mainstream paradigm imposes on the linguistic minority faculty that what they know must be expressed in the only way that they can understand. The irony of the situation is that the discourse of deficient language by minority faculty parallels with the backdrop of discourse on diversity and the importance of multiculturalism and multilingualism. Do language minorities exist to satisfy the mainstream’s self-consciousness on the idea that the academia without racial diversities would only diminish its voice and power?

McNamara’s (2012) words below clearly highlight how inexplicably language dictates the very existence of an individual and it undermines what an individual can say:
The individual’s vulnerability in the face of language moreover does not lie in the purely personal realm. The medium itself is saturated with cultural and social discourses, which may work against understanding. When what is being communicated is an experience of suffering as a result of social or political values embedded within a culture and its language, then those same social and political values may make it harder for the hearer to hear the experience that is being communicated. The very means by which the individual exists as a social being, language, is also potentially the means by which individual existence is potentially denied, either figuratively, or literally. (p. 567)

Although I am tenured, through my position of marginality as an outsider looking in, I situate these phenomena in poststructualism, which posits that the language as a medium of communication, which can never be neutral and that it favors the ones with power and privilege. The issues of the linguistic hegemony in the context of higher education for language minorities have not been dealt with honesty within the scholarly communities. Critical examinations are necessary to see how the English language’s exclusionary power negatively affects the advancements of the linguistic minority faculty. I also argue that the policies at the university level and in the publishing communities have to be radically changed for linguistic minority faculty and the systems must offer provisions for them to remedy the unjust situation posed by de-facto language policy in academic publishing.

Author

• Clara Lee Brown, The University of Tennessee - Knoxville