Authority figures paralyze me—when driving at night, I assume absolutely every car behind me is a police car. Even during the day I basically cannot speed because the fear of being caught just ruins me, which drivers stuck behind me totally appreciate. As a consequence of all this stress I have pretty much stopped driving.
It’s not as easy to avoid authority figures in the profession, alas: for all its counter-cultural pretensions, the academy remains a rigidly hierarchical civilian institution. My first academic position—recorded in capital letters in the university directory—was INEXPERIENCED TEACHING ASSISTANT; that really bolstered the ole’ confidence and gave students respect for my wisdom and authority.
At least the ladder is well defined: inexperienced TA → TA → senior TA → adjunct professor → assistant professor → associate professor → real professor.
Less well-defined is how I, a senior TA, address persons higher up the ladder.
This has been on my mind this week as I have been emailing tenured and thoroughly published professors about MLA and MSA panels. The first email is easy to construct—Dear Professor So-and-so, I prostrate myself before your elegantly-shod feet—but what happens afterward? If they sign their email with their first name, is that an invitation to call them by that name in the future? But surely no one signs an email Best, Prof. So-and-so. What if they sign with their full name? What if they sign with their initials?
To feel secure I was not causing offense, I have stuck with the language of hierarchical obeisance in my professorial correspondence.
Until last week.
For the first time, a professor scolded me for calling him by his title and surname after he had addressed me by my first name, and it occurred to me that I’m just as likely to offend someone by using their title as by not.
I’ve subsequently employed a tone which feels like a Quaker awkwardly thouing Queen Elizabeth in an elevator, and nothing at all like White Bear’s enviable chumminess or the jocular collegiality I would expect to hear in a wood-paneled Oxford faculty lounge.
Mike, it’s funny, because I realize there isn’t a protocol that works for everyone even within a particular academic institution. I recently found out that one of the profs I address so chummily by first name tells all his students that only a PhD gives them the right to do so; he only let it slide with me because I share an uncommon first name with a young professor in my field and he seems to have initially confused us. It’s hard to go back once someone is already first-naming you.
But calling everyone “Professor X” doesn’t seem to go any more smoothly, as you suggest. It makes it sound like fear, as opposed to collegiality. And grad students are in the unenviable position of being both teachers and students, which makes the deference game very hard to play.
At my university, grad students like me often teach survey and elective classes, just like our professors. We do exactly the same work, for about 1/5 or less of their pay. We sit on committees and have administrative duties. We lecture, grade, devise curriculum, and are meanwhile trying to do research in our “spare” time. And we do all this without the confidence that comes from a lifetime of learning, and without the support or professional benefits that make this work less stressful. I don’t ask my students to call me “professor,” and in fact, I insist that they try not to, but it’s really hard for me to turn around and treat my own professors like gods.
It’s not because I don’t respect them. I do, deeply. I’m very fortunate to get to work with such wonderful people. But it’s hard enough, as a grad student, to get the self-respect necessary to make the transition from student to professor. And it’s not something that will happen in the blink of an eye when we get hooded in a ceremony, or when we sign the back of our first decent paycheck. It’s a process that requires a slow shift.
I’ve known people who’ve come out of those super-deferential grad programs, and they seem to have some difficulty adjusting to the idea of being a professor. Herein we get “impostor syndrome” and all that business. Academia is already set up to make us feel neurotic and unworthy. And the confusion about proper deferential manners only makes it worse.
AWB, I’m so grateful to hear—and from you, the most fluent and sociable of nearly all the bloggers I read—that I am not alone with this neurosis (and soul-wrenching fear of unworthiness).
This seems to be one of the great strengths of blogs, to act as a sort of level ground absent the mechanisms of institutional memory.
All this confusion makes me long for a set of rules by which we could happily live—a Prof. Manner’s Guide to Academic Etiquette. Just think of all the useful chapters!
* How To Ask Someone to be Your Advisor Without Making an Ass of Yourself
* How to Write an Abstract That Does Not Assume Your Reader Is an Idiot
* Departmental Cocktail Parties: What To Say, and To Whom
* Bonus Chapter: Things Not To Email To the Grad Student Listserv
* Bonus Chapter: Things Not To Email To the Grad Student Listserv
No, no no! If you do that, I lose a major source of my amusement and the gossip isn’t nearly as good. How bout a chapter on the timing for forwarding something that has been sent to the listserv with a little note that “this is going to be good!”
Either that or “how to bug the departmental lounge for fun and profit”?
I find the idea that a degree gives you the “right” to call someone by his or her first name repulsive. There are plenty of ways to indicate one’s preferred mode of address without turning the use of the first name into a privilege to be earned.
Ahem. Now that I’ve said that — My default position is that first email = formal address, subsequent emails = first name, unless indicated otherwise, but for me this applies to anyone I’m emailing whom I haven’t met and isn’t another grad student, including administrators, support staff, etc.
The initials thing bugs the crap out of me, since it’s seemingly so dashed-off and casual, but in fact (to me) signals a desire for formal address.
My mother works in a sub-department of the medical school at her university, but her department is extremely female-heavy, in both profs and students. (Ex: It is not uncommon for her to refer to a student as “THE male student in our program this year…”)
Several years ago, the medical school had an external audit done, looking for inequality and sexist practices. They found that in my mother’s department, only the female profs asked to be called by their first names. The males all went by Dr. or Prof. So-and-So. So now there is a mandated rule that all profs, regardless of their preference, will be addressed as Dr. So-and-So, and they will communicate this to the students on the first day of class. MA students, PhD students, doesn’t matter.
Like you, I always tend to err on the side of caution, particularly in light of the above experiences, and now that I’m in a staff position amongst a bunch of faculty, I’ve stuck with the Prof. So-and-So address on pretty much all emails. I can’t even more safely divert to Dr., even though some profs are touchy about their exact academic rank (asst. prof does not rate the title address of Prof. to some,) because many of our language faculty are not PhDs, but MAs. So irritating!
I don’t even know how to sign my own emails, because I’m supposed to be in a position of authority over the students in our program, so I’ve gone with my whole name. This has resulted in some amusing attempts at over politeness from students, as I have been addressed as both Mrs. and Dr., of which I am neither.