Most institutions say they value teaching. But how they assess it tells a different story. University of Southern California has stopped using student evaluations of teaching in promotion decisions in favor of peer-review model. Oregon seeks to end quantitative evaluations of teaching for holistic model.
NLS_LANG cannot be changed by ALTER SESSION, NLS_LANGUAGE and NLS_TERRITORY can. However NLS_LANGUAGE and /or NLS_TERRITORY cannot be set as "standalone" parameters in the environment or registry on the client.
Evidently the "right" solution is, before logging into Oracle at all, setting the following environment variable:
export NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.UTF8