Global managers: MBA students at the Instituto de Empresa, Madrid

When economics students returned this winter to the elite École Normale Supérieure in Paris, copies of a petition were posted in the corridors demanding an unlikely privilege: French as a teaching language (The institute has recently started teaching some courses in English). The petition declared that it was unacceptable for a native French professor to teach standard courses to French-speaking students in English.

In the shifting universe of global academia, English is becoming as commonplace as creeping ivy and mortarboards. In the last five years, the world’s top business schools and universities have been pushing to make English the teaching tongue to raise revenue by attracting more international students.

Business universities are driving the trend, partly because changes in international accreditation standards in the late 1990s required them to include English-language components. But English is also spreading to the undergraduate level.

In Madrid, business students can take their admission test in English for the elite Instituto de Empresa and enrol in core courses for a masters degree in business administration in the same language. The Lille School of Management in France stopped considering English a foreign language in 1999, and now half the postgraduate programmes are taught in English.

Over the last three years, the number of masters programmes offered in English at universities with another host language has more than doubled, according to David A. Wilson, chief executive of the Graduate Management Admission Council, an international organisation of leading business schools that is based in McLean, Virginia.

“(Teaching in) English allows students to be able to come from anyplace in the world and for our students — the French ones — to go everywhere,” said Laurent Bibard, the dean of MBA programmes at Essec, a top French business school in Paris that is a fertile breeding ground for chief executives.

This year Essec is celebrating its 100th anniversary in its adopted tongue. Its publicity film debuted in English and French. Along one of the main roads leading into Paris looms a giant blue billboard boasting of the anniversary in French and, in smaller letters, in English.

Essec has also taken advantage of the increased revenue that foreign students — English-speaking ones — can bring in. Its population of foreign students has leapt by 38 per cent in four years. The tuition for a two-year masters degree in business administration is 19,800 euros for European Union citizens, and 34,000 euros for non-EU citizens.

“The French market for local students is not unlimited,” said Christophe N. Bredillet, the associate dean for the Lille School of Management’s MBA and postgraduate programmes. “Revenue is very important, and in order to provide good services, we need to cover our expenses for the library and research journals. For that we need a larger number of students so it’s quite important to attract international students.”

Essec now offers 25 per cent of its 200 courses in English. Its ambition is to accelerate the English offerings to 50 per cent in the next three years.

Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño, dean of the Instituto de Empresa, argues that the trend is a natural consequence of globalisation, with English functioning as Latin did in the 13th century as the lingua franca of universities.

“English is being adapted as a working language, but it’s not Oxford English,” he said. “It’s a language that most stakeholders speak.”

But getting students to feel comfortable speaking English in the classroom is easier said than done. When younger French students at Essec start a required course in organisational analysis, the atmosphere is marked by long, uncomfortable silences, said Alan Jenkins, a management professor and academic director of the executive MBA programme.

“Internationally, the competition is everywhere,” Bredillet said. “For a masters in management, I’m competing with George Washington University. I’m competing with some programmes in Germany, Norway and the UK. That’s why we’re delivering the curriculum in English.”