A new June 2009 position paper from the British Academy, arising from a one year study to…
“investigate the hypothesis that UK humanities and social science research was becoming increasingly insular in outlook (and even in aims)”
… due to the way in which, it is claimed, a…
“lack of [ second ] language skills inflicts a real handicap on scholars”.
Inward-looking UK funding models may also be a strong factor, although this is not mentioned. And the incredible barriers raised by European universities against British academic job-seekers.
Equally worryingly, the report talks of…
“An over-reliance on imported talent” … [ humanities and social science ] “university departments are increasingly addressing this skills shortage by buying-in the skills they need from abroad, rather than by seeking to help UK researchers and academics to ‘upskill’.”
That sounds very familiar. A very accurate observation, I’d say.
In the absence of such UK language skills, perhaps we need a Google Translate specialist ‘Humanities Scholar version’. Along with serious up-skilling on search in other languages. In China you can’t become even a junior academic, unless you pass a rigorous state test on how to use Google ‘to the max’. The test includes…
“how to use Google for automatic translation from Chinese to English or the other way round”