PROF. JENKINS: Of course students must master standard English

Rob Jenkins is a Higher Education Fellow with Campus Reform and a tenured associate professor of English at Georgia State University - Perimeter College. The opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his employer.

My entire career as a college English professor, I’ve heard the argument that students shouldn’t be required to master standard English.

Back in the 80s and 90s, it was framed as “the students’ right to their own language,” as if we teachers are somehow imposing “our language” on them. More recently, we see leftist professors and administrators insisting that standard English is merely “a tool of white supremacy.”

The latest example comes from Metropolitan State University in Denver, CO. According to a recent story in Campus Reform, the institution’s Writing Center, on its web page, describes standard English as “a social construct that privileges white communities and maintains social and racial hierarchies.”

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This is pernicious, self-defeating nonsense. Of course college graduates must be able to use standard English, and use it well, if they hope to be successful professionally. And that’s just as true for black, Hispanic, and Asian students as it is for white students.

 Before we go on, it might be useful to define “standard English.” The word “standard” in this phrase does not signify a flag we must all salute. Rather, it describes a set of recognized norms.

 The norms can change over time, as language evolves—contemporary English differs from Elizabethan English and even from 1950s English—but that doesn’t mean, at any given point, there are no norms. There are, and successful people from all walks of life recognize and follow them.

 Think of the former professional athlete who becomes a television sports commentator. He might have been an indifferent student in his college playing days, might even have dropped out of school early to go pro. Now he sounds like he has a master’s degree in communication.

 That’s because he gets it. He recognizes that, to be good at his job, he must speak in a way that everyone can understand and that reflects well on him.

 More than anything else, “standard” English is a dialect, a subset of the language. It may be very different from the regional and cultural dialects many of us grew up speaking. I’m from the mountains of Northwest Georgia, and I can assure you the dialect I spoke in the locker room with my high school basketball teammates was not standard English.

 And that’s fine. The main purpose of language is to communicate, and as long as that happens, the speaker has been successful. There’s nothing inherently wrong with regional or cultural dialects. Indeed, many Americans now speak a language other than English at home, and there’s obviously nothing wrong with that, either.

 The problem arises when, in professional life, we interact with people from other backgrounds, regions, and cultures, who might not have grown up speaking the same dialect we did. In that case, when we insist on “our own language,” we risk miscommunication—and in professional life, miscommunication can be potentially catastrophic, not to mention expensive.

 Fortunately, if you’re a college graduate, and those other people are also college graduates, you should share a dialect that enables you to communicate with each other. That dialect is standard English.

 It’s kind of like moving to another country and learning the language so you can engage in commerce and social interactions. Except in this case, most people who grow up in the United States already know about 80 percent of the “language.” The other 20 percent is what you’re supposed to learn in college.

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There’s another good reason for students to master standard English, too: In professional life, people will often judge you accordingly. They’ll make assumptions about your education, your intelligence, your professionalism, and your competence based on how well you write and speak standard English. That might not be entirely fair; it’s just the way the world works.

 In that vein, I find it very telling that one of the primary indicators a student has used AI to write an essay is that the English is impeccable. Evidently, the people training the large language models understand very well the realities I’ve described above.

 When we refuse to insist that students master standard English, out of some misguided sense of fairness, we’re not doing them any favors. We’re only making it more difficult for them to be successful in their chosen professions.

 Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.