Dear Editor,
A few days ago I opened my mailbox to find a letter from Tufts about Summer English Courses and tossed it into the recycling bin without opening it, and I'm guessing most international students will know where I'm going with this. I'm not sure who else gets these ‘invitations' to brush up on their English during the summer on a yearly basis, whether it's mailed en masse to all international students or just students who don't hail from the Western hemisphere, but I sure know that my Californian roommate didn't. I am an international student, and ... surprise! Though I'm from an Asian country (Singapore) like so many of the people I know who get these mailings, English is my first and native language, I did as well on my English SATs as most, and I can play a pretty mean game of Bananagrams.
Frankly it is insulting, and moreover it is disappointing, that a school like Tufts, supposedly progressive and international in its perspective, is as ignorant about its international student population and about international demographics as it has repeatedly demonstrated itself to be with these mailings over the years. Yes, it is perhaps true that English isn't the first language of a lot of students from Asian countries, and a number of them do struggle with it, but where I'm from, English is the national language, and it's the language in which we take the Cambridge O levels and A levels which are objectively of a much higher standard than the SATs. And while no one would expect the man on the street to know that — our tiny red dot flies perhaps as far under the radar as you can go, and Singaporeans are hardly flamboyantly patriotic — I definitely expected more from a university more from my university, which would be the last institution I would expect to be perpetrating ignorant and lazy assumptions about the world beyond the USA.
Tan Yee Hui
Tufts 2014
Religion, Peace and Justice Studies
