All the choices in the world

Over at Slate, there's an education columnist named Rebecca Schuman (by day an English PhD/adjunct professor), who earns her Slate money writing appalling articles about the Ivory Tower that, more often than not, fundamentally misrepresent my profession. She clearly has a lot of pent-up anger at the university system in the U.S. and English departments in particular, and as a result most of her articles (even ones that don't directly attack university practices) are seeped in spite and self-pity. It's an ongoing mystery to me why someone with so much evident loathing for her job and its administrators hasn't jumped ship and become an accountant or something. (Case in point: this wildly misguided article arguing that English professors should stop asking students to write papers, because students aren't good at writing and teaching is, like, hard.)

That said, Schuman does occasionally write interesting, informative columns that resonate with my own experiences. She did so this week in an article about the difficulties of properly addressing a teacher in a college setting.

Schuman lays out the situation rather clearly: Within university departments, figuring out the proper title to apply to a college teacher (Ms/Mr? Dr? Professor? Bob? Teach?) is fraught in a way that seems mildly absurd to most people outside academia's bubble. The basic problem is that the most obvious and readily available moniker -- Professor -- is a specific job title, one reserved for tenured faculty. Calling someone like me "Professor" would grate on some people's ears like calling an Army Private "Captain." Then again, professor can also just mean "teacher," and this is the mentality that the average college student brings to the classroom; most students call the older, blazer-wearing person in the room "professor" not because it's an administration-sanctioned job title but simply because that's what they've been told to call teachers in an university setting.

But if you want to get snippy about reserving the title of "professor" for real Professors (and trust me, there are a lot of people who do), things get messy fast. Schuman describes it this way:

First off, at large research universities, a lot of “professors” aren’t professors at all—they’re graduate TAs. Many are a year or two older than their students, and as such most go by their first names. However, they are almost always listed as “Instructor,” which leads to absurd misnomers—I laugh so much about being called “Instructor Schuman” that my husband had it embroidered on a bathrobe for me.

In addition to grad students, a lot of professors are adjuncts, like me (for eight more weeks!), and though you can technically call us “Professor,” on the roster we’re usually just listed as “Staff.” We may even ask that you not call us “Professor” so that you recognize that the school treats us differently. But many of us have doctorates, so we like to be called “Doctor.” But some of us don’t!

It gets worse: Many full-time professors don’t have doctorates (MFAs, for example)—so they can’t be “Doctor” either. But they’re tenured professors, so you’d best call them “Professor.”

Okay, fine, you might be thinking. If everyone's going to get so worked up about "Professor," just go by "Ms." Problem solved. Well, kind of, but not really. As Schuman notes, for female teachers anyway, there are some weird political overtones surrounding the use of "Ms.":

Recent studies show that college students tend to view women and minorities with less respect from the start, and that is often reflected in bestowing names, titles, or lack thereof. [...] I myself feel rankled when someone who knows full well I have an earned doctorate refers to my male peers as “Professor” or “Doctor” yet calls me “Ms. Schuman.” It happens all the time, and I often hear a sneer in the “izzzzz.”

In other words, if a student is facing a male and a female teacher in a room, and the student isn't aware of their proper titles, the man is more likely to be called "Professor," the woman "Ms." Of course, 99% of the time, no student calling me "Ms." is doing so maliciously in a deliberate attempt to imply, "I don't respect you because of your chromosomes." But when you have those statistics and studies rattling around in your brain, it suddenly feels just a little wrong or insulting to be called "Ms." You want students to call you "Professor," even if it's technically a mistake, because you like how it implies that they acknowledge you as an authority.

So where does that leave people like me? Schuman's recommendation is to let students know "immediately" what to call you: "Whatever you want to be called, name yourself this thing in person and on the syllabus—and if the students don’t catch on, don’t be afraid to correct them."

I suspect that Schuman draws this conclusion because she has a PhD, and so it feels comfortable or even empowering for her to tell her students, "Call me Dr. Schuman," and I wonder if she'd make the same recommendation if her so-called proper title was "Ms." For myself, I've opted to go the opposite route: I'm remaining mute on the subject. After all, mature and confident faculty don't usually bother with telling students what to call them, and as such I feel like taking pains to emphasize my title (no matter what it is) will only serve to make it seem like I'm the one anxious about my authority and abilities. I haven't told my students how to address me, and I sign emails with my initials.

The result has been that most address me as "Professor." A few use "Ms." No one has yet called me "Dr." or addressed me by my first name. I never correct them, no matter what they do. (Well, I would correct it if anyone ever did call me "Dr." because that's wrong in a pretty unambiguous way.) In a class that is 92% composed of male students, I haven't yet been in a situation where I've felt disrespected or undermined.

As I mentioned in my last post, I live in a community of university-dwelling critics who tend to chronically over-analyze and over-think things, and I usually embrace that impulse. But this is one situation where simply chilling out seems by far the best way to go.