This should not happen. All faculty who come from abroad have given seminars here as part of the hiring process; virtually all have long written and lectured in English. All graduate teaching assistants whose native language is not English have been screened for competence in oral English. They also have the opportunity to participate in the International Teaching Assistant Development Program, a semester-long course in which graduate students whose native language is not English learn better English pronunciation and cross-cultural classroom dynamics as well as engage in a teaching practicum. If your son or daughter has an instructor who cannot speak English, we need to know that instructor’s name and department so we can remedy the situation.
Having said this, however, we point out that among America’s good fortunes is that English is the international language of educated people. While we Americans do and should learn other languages, we can expect most international conversations to take place in English, in which we are expert. This means, however, that we need to appreciate the hard work foreigners put into learning English, and we need to be tolerant of others’ use of it in non-standard American ways. One faculty member of the mathematics department, an Englishman, routinely gives a non-technical first lecture in order to allow students to get used to his "accent." More than once a student’s complaint about an instructor’s incompetence in English has turned out to be a complaint about an Indian whose English is more complex and elegant than that which we Americans usually produce. We insist that instructors be competent in English. We also expect our students to make some efforts to understand accents different from their own.
Of course, university towns can also be quite parochial. Inscribed on a wall in Göttingen (like Ithaca, a somewhat rural university setting) one can read “Extra Gottingam, non est vita.” “Outside Göttingen, there is no life.” Such, one suspects, could be the motto for many college towns, Ithaca included.
Great universities are by their nature cosmopolitan communities. Among Cornell’s good fortunes is that it attracts outstanding graduate students and scholars from all over the world. This means that the Cornell campus and Ithaca are much more cosmopolitan and culturally sophisticated than most rural places. These "accented" instructors contribute much cultural richness -- including varied and interesting cuisines -- to our community.