University of Oslo semester abroad student language accommodation

Tom's advisee, second year on faculty, went to Oslo without learning Norwegian; class was conducted in English to accommodate her. Used as an aside on the global retreat of foreign-language requirements at MIT.

The second year I was on the faculty, we had a young woman of Scandinavian descent who decided she wanted to go to the University of Oslo for a semester abroad. This is before we had all these programs. She came back as she was starting her junior year and I was her adviser, and I said, well, how did you learn Norwegian? Oh, I just went over there. I said, how did you take the classes? Because I found out she'd gone over there five days before classes started at the University. She said, oh, I just took them. What she didn't tell me, I found out later, is in many countries including Norway, if there is one student in the class who doesn't speak the native language, they will require all the other students to take the class in English. So the Norwegian students had to take the class in English — and the professors all speak English. You talk to Germans, everybody speaks English.