Anthropologist Susan Blum, a professor of Anthropology and a Liu Institute fellow who specializes in China, wrote an important piece for Inside Higher Ed regarding an incident where Chinese students were criticized for speaking their native language in public at Duke University.
"Threatening students with discrimination for speaking their own language is abhorrent. And, unfortunately, the current case is just another in a long line of difficulties that linguistic anthropologists and social psychologists have sadly detailed over the course of the centuries.
"Perhaps it's a teaching moment -- a teaching moment for faculty members who have a responsibility not only to not impose their own prejudices but also to inform themselves about the realities of multilingual speakers in our multilingual, multicultural, multitalented world."
Full article available at Inside Higher Ed.