Recently, some English-only programs have been popping up and foreigners here are getting advanced degrees from Taiwanese universities without learning any Chinese. Amazingly, quite a few of those foreigners are getting degrees in Taiwan Studies, without the ability to understand much of anything Taiwanese people speak or write.

Monolingual PHD programs aren't limited to Taiwan, either. In mainland Chinese schools, 100% mandarin programs are even more common. I've also had the acquaintance of a Japanese physics post-doc with what couldn't possibly be construed as a "working" knowledge of English.

Thank you for mentioning the example of Taiwan, the country where I have lived longest outside the United States. Let me first agree with you that I should have reported the book's statement as "earn a Ph.D. academic degree without being expected to gain a working knowledge of a second language," which more accurately represents what the book said, and takes into account cases in which the Ph.D. candidate does the bare minimum of what is required before giving up on language study.

Let me ask some questions about current conditions in Taiwan. Isn't 大一英文 (first-year university English) still a routine course for university students in Taiwan? And isn't English still one element of the college entrance examination in Taiwan? And isn't English still a compulsory subject in secondary schooling in Taiwan? (And, after all, isn't that the language we are writing to each other just now, although it appears we could both write in Chinese?)

But the situation of bilingualism in Taiwan is more nuanced than that. Most people in Taiwan in my generation learned a second language in primary school. They learned Mandarin (Modern Standard Chinese) even though their home language was either Taiwanese (in most cases) or Hakka or some other non-Mandarin Sinitic language, or one of the non-Sinitic aboriginal languages of Taiwan. Most people in Taiwan my age (Baby Boom generation) or younger are proficient in Mandarin, but two generations ago very few people on Taiwan spoke Mandarin at home. That's a major example of a huge amount of second-language learning in a Third World poor country.

Accepting your correction that some people get Ph.D.s without MEETING the expectation that they should learn a second language (which is how I should have said what the book said in the first place), I still find it baffling that in the United States there are large numbers of young people who pursue higher education who never even consider enrolling in any second language course, and who have not taken any such course in high school. Study of Spanish is quite widespread in the United States, with French, German, and now Chinese following behind, but there do seem here genuinely to be more people farther along in higher education who have never, ever studied a foreign language than there possibly could be in most other countries, where taking a test in an acquired language is usually a routine part of college entrance testing. I have had the appalling experience of meeting United States professors of Chinese history who can't speak Modern Standard Chinese well enough to talk their way out of a paper bag (I've met others who speak well), so I think the Ph.D.-ready standard even in related disciplines here is not high by world standards.

For example, if you go to many European universities and visit any science/engineering/math department with significant foreign faculty, the language spoken is usually English. And of course that's the language in which most papers, theses, etc. are published.