Coming at it from the teaching side there is definitely a high correlation between lack of foreign accent and good teaching skills. In school I used to help assign graduate TAs into math sections. We would go through and rate all the graduate students by teaching skill and then use that to divide up teaching and grading assignments.

The data showed unambiguously that TAs who lost their accent were much better teachers than those who didn't. It wasn't about not being able to understand the words of the TA; there was an English qualification test that weeded out anyone who couldn't be understood clearly. I think the lack of accent was a proxy for other changes, like being adaptable and willing to alter one's behavior. The bad TAs with accents tended to use ineffective teaching techniques and not change while the good TAs updated their teaching methods based on feedback.

Agreed. The thick accent is just the tip of the iceberg. I found people like this to be somewhat old-school. Education as a hazing experience rather than a process of learning.

This fits well with my experience.

This happens all over the world?? In my university (USP at São Paulo, Brazil) there were several foreign - normally Russian - physics and calculus teachers with terrible accents - some were still learning portuguese.

In my undergrad EE, we had an elderly german prof who pronounced "quiescent" as "christian." Awesome professor, but half the class didn't take the initiative to understand (1) the meaning of the word or (2) it's true pronunciation. Could you imagine communicating with these people in industry?! It would've been maddening. </anecdote>

I recently had a math prof with a bit of an accent and also fairly bad handwriting. He always used the variables "u" and something that sounded like "wee", where "wee" was drawn kind of like a backwards uppercase "N" where the right hand tail didn't go all the way down to the baseline.

I realized about 5 weeks into the class that "wee" was actually just "v". :( I've had other profs with heavy accents before (that other people said they couldn't understand but I did alright with), but this prof just completely lost me on some words.

My Electronic Circuits professor pronounced 'threshold' as 's-ratio'. I didn't actually discover until after the semester in another class that there was something called a 'voltage threshold'.

I had a professor turn pivot into something close to pervert (pee-vert, to be precise). It was... distracting.

But I do understand how hard it is. I don't even know how long I confused the pronunciation of cheveux (hair) and chevaux (horses) and I used to butcher the pronunciation of l'eau (water; it sounds like 'low' not 'loo').