jmdelire wrote on 19.02.21 10:43:

Another example, which perhaps is not to be generalized : a year ago, I was informed that a position as Professor of History of mathematics would be opened at the University of Wuppertal (Germany). […] But, when I asked if I could teach in English for a year or two (before becoming able to do it in German, a language of which I have a passive knowledge), it was answered that this would not be possible. […]

I don't know about the particulars of the situation in Wuppertal, but at my university here in Munich the matter is that all compulsory undergraduate courses must be offered in German. The students have a right to that. The non-compulsory courses are just that (not compulsory, so even without an active mastery of English, or the ability to understand English-language lectures, you can get a B.A. degree). Post-graduate courses are a different matter. So an American colleague in religious studies in his first years taught only post-graduate courses, and after admirably improving his active mastery of German, he also taught under-graduate classes. (When I came here twenty years ago, things were tougher and I had to do everything in German from the start.)

As long as there are no tuition fees (i.e., the universities are financed with tax payers' money), I think it quite defensible that basic university education must be offered in the official language of the country (esp. in Germany in a subject like Indology), and it's reasonable that the same applies, mutatis mutandis, to France and other countries. You simply can't expect all the students to have a near-native mastery of English or any other foreign language. At the same time, the new professor will quickly learn the language of his environment anyway, if he wants to participate in social life in general, on- and off-campus.

Jan E.M. Houben wrote on 18.02.21 23:53:

sans accepter la diversité régionale, culturelle et linguistique, la science et l'érudition perdraient pourtant une grande partie de la richesse qui leur appartenait traditionnellement ...
(= without accepting regional, cultural and linguistic diversity, science and scholarship would nevertheless lose much of the richness which has been traditionally theirs ...)

I can sympathize with that (and let us recall that Jan once wrote an essay about ideo-diversity). Ceterum censeo: I also sympathize with the Australian government's standing up to Facebook &co. in the interest of Australian media.

RZ

--
Prof. Dr. Robert J. Zydenbos / ಪ್ರೊ. ಡಾ. ರೊಬೆರ್ತ್ ಜೆಯ್ದೆನ್ಬೊಸ್
Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie
Department für Asienstudien
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Deutschland