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authority
Back in spring I joined an "Academic Mamas" group on FB, and it's been quite interesting. One thing that has recently come to the fore, in many different threads, is what students should call their teachers. There are a lot of people in the group who are very exercised by ensuring that their students call them "Prof. X" or "Dr. X" and not "hey [given name]" or "M(r)s. X".
I can understand stressing the importance of using Prof. or Dr. rather than a gendered title reflecting marital status, since the latter has no place in the classroom; I still remember my first course at UW-Marshfield/Wood County, and the first thing the teacher said was "You can call me Julie or Dr. Tharp, but Mrs. Tharp is my mother-in-law, and I will not answer to that." But what I find interesting is the number of people who take umbrage at the idea of their students calling them by their first name, and the reason many of them give is that it undermines their authority in the classroom, and they insist on the use of their formal title as a sign of authority and respect.
I find this baffling.
Maybe it's because, even 7+ years, "Dr. Uckelman" just isn't who I am. Dr. Uckelman is a person who writes snooty, irritated complaint letters, or who opens a bank account, or who has only recently gotten used to being "Mrs. Uckelman" on account of having a child. (This is an interesting side topic: I got used to being "Sara Uckelman" pretty quickly after getting married. But being "Mrs. Uckelman" remained a very weird concept, in part because growing up, my mom was "Mrs. Friedemann" mostly in contexts that involved her being my mother, not her being my dad's wife. So it was weird to be a Mrs. without kids. Since I've had Gwen, I've found it easier to be Mrs. Uckelman -- though since I had Gwen after the PhD, I often feel torn and that I should be Dr. Uckelman to these people.) Maybe it's because I started teaching back when I was still "Miss Friedemann" and like heck was I going to let ANYONE know this; in a sense, I established my authority in my first teaching experience by being Sara, rather than by being [title] [surname], and that is what I have become comfortable with. I respect that some students may be more comfortable with calling me Dr. Uckelman than calling me Sara; but that's their prerogative. I find it off-putting, especially when it's amongst students I work closely with or who are my supervisees; I worry that they do it because they feel that they must keep me at a distance, and I don't want them to feel that way. But I am not going to insist that they call me something that they are not comfortable calling me with. I'll just keep signing my emails "Sara", and eventually they'll come around.
Because with one exception, I don't recall any case where I felt like my authority in the classroom was compromised. The exception was when I was TAing intro logic with Antonio Rauti, so this had to have been my 2nd year in grad school, so I was 21, possibly (if it was second semester) soon to be 22. I had a student, a graduating senior (i.e., he had to be a year older than me) double majoring in math and computer science and already accepted to grad programs at Harvard and Stanford. He was taking Phil 211 because he needed humanities credits to graduate, and it made it clear during the first tutorial that he was unimpressed with the idea of a young woman teaching him logic.
The last day of class, he came up, shook my hand, and said basically that he thought I'd done a good job and he took back his comments (not in so many words, but that was clearly the intent).
Which makes me wonder: What is it about me or my teaching style that I am not encountering the sorts of disrespect and lack of authority that these other women, who insist that their students keep them at arm's length? While I'd like to say that I'm just a natural in the classroom someone who can command respect regardless of age or gender, I think a much more likely explanation is the same one as for why I feel like I've made it as far as I have in academia without experiencing the overt sexism that many other women have had: I'm simply oblivious to it. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. If I don't feel like I am not maintaining my authority in the class room, does it matter then if I am or not? (In this case, authority is very different from sexism: If I am oblivious to the sexism, it's still happening. But if I am oblivious to my authority being undermined, is it being undermined?)
As I said in one of the twitter conversations this spawned, I like teaching 18+ people because they have the potential to be my peers. In terms of being fellow adults responsible for themselves, they already are my peers. Maybe in terms of the academy, they aren't my peers when they arrive fresh faced first term first year. But part of my job is to get them to the point where they can be them by the end of their 3rd years, by the time they're doing actual real research underneath me, by the time we're covering advanced topics in their classes. I want to be able to send these students drafts of my papers, to show them what the research process looks like. I want to encourage them to write papers with me. I want them to feel a part of a research group. This will never happen if they are always [given name] and I am always Dr. X. Why not establish things as I mean to go on? I don't want to spend the first year or two teaching them to call me Dr. Uckelman only to then try my best to get them to say "Sara" in their final year: This doesn't make sense.
Finally, I also asked a bunch of the women: If you insist that they call you "Dr. X" as a sign of respect, do you in return call them "Mr./Ms./Mx. X"? For the most part, the answer was no, and the reason given was that "Dr." is an earned title but "Mr./Ms./Mx." is not. I'm not sure I understand this as an explanation. Partly because, while "Dr." is an earned title, most of us cannot say that we earned our position at university, teaching these people, or that we deserve to be there (this isn't to say that our being there isn't merited); academia is such a crap shoot, that I feel it is more pure luck rather than any just desserts on my part that has put me in front of my students.
I can understand stressing the importance of using Prof. or Dr. rather than a gendered title reflecting marital status, since the latter has no place in the classroom; I still remember my first course at UW-Marshfield/Wood County, and the first thing the teacher said was "You can call me Julie or Dr. Tharp, but Mrs. Tharp is my mother-in-law, and I will not answer to that." But what I find interesting is the number of people who take umbrage at the idea of their students calling them by their first name, and the reason many of them give is that it undermines their authority in the classroom, and they insist on the use of their formal title as a sign of authority and respect.
I find this baffling.
Maybe it's because, even 7+ years, "Dr. Uckelman" just isn't who I am. Dr. Uckelman is a person who writes snooty, irritated complaint letters, or who opens a bank account, or who has only recently gotten used to being "Mrs. Uckelman" on account of having a child. (This is an interesting side topic: I got used to being "Sara Uckelman" pretty quickly after getting married. But being "Mrs. Uckelman" remained a very weird concept, in part because growing up, my mom was "Mrs. Friedemann" mostly in contexts that involved her being my mother, not her being my dad's wife. So it was weird to be a Mrs. without kids. Since I've had Gwen, I've found it easier to be Mrs. Uckelman -- though since I had Gwen after the PhD, I often feel torn and that I should be Dr. Uckelman to these people.) Maybe it's because I started teaching back when I was still "Miss Friedemann" and like heck was I going to let ANYONE know this; in a sense, I established my authority in my first teaching experience by being Sara, rather than by being [title] [surname], and that is what I have become comfortable with. I respect that some students may be more comfortable with calling me Dr. Uckelman than calling me Sara; but that's their prerogative. I find it off-putting, especially when it's amongst students I work closely with or who are my supervisees; I worry that they do it because they feel that they must keep me at a distance, and I don't want them to feel that way. But I am not going to insist that they call me something that they are not comfortable calling me with. I'll just keep signing my emails "Sara", and eventually they'll come around.
Because with one exception, I don't recall any case where I felt like my authority in the classroom was compromised. The exception was when I was TAing intro logic with Antonio Rauti, so this had to have been my 2nd year in grad school, so I was 21, possibly (if it was second semester) soon to be 22. I had a student, a graduating senior (i.e., he had to be a year older than me) double majoring in math and computer science and already accepted to grad programs at Harvard and Stanford. He was taking Phil 211 because he needed humanities credits to graduate, and it made it clear during the first tutorial that he was unimpressed with the idea of a young woman teaching him logic.
The last day of class, he came up, shook my hand, and said basically that he thought I'd done a good job and he took back his comments (not in so many words, but that was clearly the intent).
Which makes me wonder: What is it about me or my teaching style that I am not encountering the sorts of disrespect and lack of authority that these other women, who insist that their students keep them at arm's length? While I'd like to say that I'm just a natural in the classroom someone who can command respect regardless of age or gender, I think a much more likely explanation is the same one as for why I feel like I've made it as far as I have in academia without experiencing the overt sexism that many other women have had: I'm simply oblivious to it. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. If I don't feel like I am not maintaining my authority in the class room, does it matter then if I am or not? (In this case, authority is very different from sexism: If I am oblivious to the sexism, it's still happening. But if I am oblivious to my authority being undermined, is it being undermined?)
As I said in one of the twitter conversations this spawned, I like teaching 18+ people because they have the potential to be my peers. In terms of being fellow adults responsible for themselves, they already are my peers. Maybe in terms of the academy, they aren't my peers when they arrive fresh faced first term first year. But part of my job is to get them to the point where they can be them by the end of their 3rd years, by the time they're doing actual real research underneath me, by the time we're covering advanced topics in their classes. I want to be able to send these students drafts of my papers, to show them what the research process looks like. I want to encourage them to write papers with me. I want them to feel a part of a research group. This will never happen if they are always [given name] and I am always Dr. X. Why not establish things as I mean to go on? I don't want to spend the first year or two teaching them to call me Dr. Uckelman only to then try my best to get them to say "Sara" in their final year: This doesn't make sense.
Finally, I also asked a bunch of the women: If you insist that they call you "Dr. X" as a sign of respect, do you in return call them "Mr./Ms./Mx. X"? For the most part, the answer was no, and the reason given was that "Dr." is an earned title but "Mr./Ms./Mx." is not. I'm not sure I understand this as an explanation. Partly because, while "Dr." is an earned title, most of us cannot say that we earned our position at university, teaching these people, or that we deserve to be there (this isn't to say that our being there isn't merited); academia is such a crap shoot, that I feel it is more pure luck rather than any just desserts on my part that has put me in front of my students.
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For example, I've noticed something among social groups of women that I interact with that I don't notice among mixed social groups or ones that are primarily men: people who take a strong position that people with a PhD (as opposed to MD) who use the address "Dr" are viewed as being pretentious and stuck-up and think they're better than anyone else. This is the sort of gendered aspect I'm talking about. In a context like that, a female PhD can find herself in the no-win position of either declining to claim her hard-won status or of being sneered at for doing so, in an atmosphere where a male PhD using the title of Dr is treated as a neutral act.
When I attended UC Berkeley, the title culture that I encountered was both entirely unofficial and fairly rigidly adhered to: undergrads always addressed PhDs as Dr or Professor (as appropriate -- not all the PhDs on staff were professors); grad students addressed PhDs/professors by first name; but when grad students were talking to undergrads *about* a PhD/professor they used the title.
Since I'm not in academia, the question doesn't come up as often for me, but if I am required to provide a form of address (e.g., on a form) or if someone uses a form of address to me in anything but the most passing interaction, I will insist on Dr. The issue *does* come up occasionally at work, because many people with science PhDs explicitly include Dr (or a post-posed "PhD") in their e-mail ID blocks, and these sometimes get wielded as status weapons. So I've occasionally made a point of doing the same. But the practices are fall less standardized than they were at UCB.
I'm a bit curious why you feel that using a professional title is "holding students at arms length". Or why the existence of a formal distance between professor and student would be a detriment to teaching. (It reminds me a little of the people who want their children and their children's friends to address them by first name because they want to be "the cool parent".) University is an inherently structured and hierarchical institution. You aren't you're students' friend, you're their teacher.
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This is definitely a My Personal Experience thing: I don't like being Dr. Uckelman or Prof. Uckelman to my students because I'm not entirely sure who that person is and I am not entirely comfortable being that person, and I feel awkward trying to teach while being that person and thus I don't teach as well.
As for formal distance between professor and student -- I don't think it has to be detrimental. But again, I think it is detrimental for me and my teaching. This has a big part to do with why I went into teaching in the first place: The pastoral side of things. There are many aspects of being a university student in the 21st C that are already hard enough, and I don't want "an uncomfortable distance between you and the person who could help you" to be another barrier. What level of distance is "uncomfortable" goes both ways; I am more comfortable as 'Sara', so that is what I prefer/promote, but if the student is more comfortable with Dr. Uckelman, then I am fine with that (while continually making it clear that if they would be more comfortable with 'Sara' then I am okay with that). I have had some students in my office telling me of really sad and scary things, but what I find hardest about these encounters is how scared they sometimes are of telling these things and asking for help, even if it's just a week's deadline extension. I want whatever distance is between me and my students to be small enough that when they ARE in this position, they feel they can come to me for fair treatment and no judgement.
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Also this year I've finally had 100% uptake of Dr. Scientist! I didn't even write my first name on the board this time.
It might be the culture, it might be the subject
On the other hand it could be a cultural thing, when I was growing up the married/older ladies at our church were upset when we (youth)called them by their first names, that was something only one within that group could do.
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But if they come from FE or a sixth form college on its own -- and not an independent sixth form college (as in fees-paying), chances are good that they called their A level lecturers by their first names. It's a good shock to their systems when they arrive at the FE college where I work. Not only do they have the freedom to choose their own clothes (no uniform -- and they love it!), but they're placed on a more equal footing with their teachers in terms of names; we all use first names. In AS English Language, we actually discuss it as a form of accommodation. The students like it. Most of them say it makes them feel more comfortable asking questions.
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Oh, that's cool. Do you have any academic literature on the topic that you could recommend?
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There are numerous articles -- good ones by Giles or Giles and Justine Coupland and Nikolas Coupland -- and books as well. Also look for Street and Giles.
Here's a freebie scanned online.
web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/lsa11/gilescouplandcoupland.pdf
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As I got older and they didn't, reminding students that we really weren't equals in this context became less of an issue.
Now I'm in the reverse situation: I'm at a workplace where everybody goes by first names, and at least four of my former students work there too; it takes work to get them to use my first name.