Especially the 19th century Royal Navy one who was found to be a woman after she died - though this may well be a case where gender neutral terms are called for.
3 Likes
Which is precisely the point I was attempting to make! Thanks for backing me up here. Itâs not to deny that elitism doesnât exist or that professors or people who earn PhDs canât be elitists, but that the elitism historically has been racialized and gendered to the benefit of white men and to not take that into account is missing the pointâŠ
8 Likes
I agree with everything youâre saying, without exception. I only add my wish that people who spend ten years slinging out hamburgers got more than a silver pin for their loyalty and effort.
Itâs interesting to note that âengineerâ is a title in some countries, but not in the US. âDoctorâ is motile across contexts, but ânurseâ is not. âEsquireâ is a formal title used only by licensed attorneys but youâll never hear it used so much as see it on shingles. and when I was briefly engaged in paralegal studies, âcounselorâ was what I used and it didnât seem to rankle my instructors in the slightest because that was their day job. I find it all so arbitrary that I personally am no fan of titles. I always use them unless expressly informed that they are not preferred but thatâs out of respect for the person, and what their achievements mean to them, and a sense of basic politeness. I always have extra respect people who are trying to teach me something. All of this is to say what youâve said more succinctly: The prestige of a title adheres poorly to POC and women because they so often donât receive that basic respect that others do.
Absolutely. Itâs never some Quaker popping into the comments to talk about how they never use titles as a matter of genuine religious practice (something Iâm sure this professor would accommodate). It always someone whoâs been spending their whole life going, âyessir, nossirâ until they run into a black man or woman.
5 Likes
I can respect that perspective, but this hasnât been my experience so this may be a âyour mileage may varyâ situation. The POCs and women who get addressed by titles at my academic institution are higher level administrators (for whom a doctorate is usually a job requirement), but the ones who Iâve heard insist on their titles being used are privileged white male professors (for whom a doctorate isnât always a requirement).
For example, Dr. Joe Smith insists on being called Dr. Smith but campus president Dr. Jane Brown says, âcall me Janeâ when you meet her in person. But I work at a liberal northwestern institution, so I wouldnât be surprised if itâs very different in other places.
No, I think this is based on a misunderstanding of the role the title plays in modern academia. There is a big problem in American colleges and universities of students disrespecting female professors. This manifests itself in lower teaching evaluations, higher rate of complaints to chairs or deans, and a higher incidence of classroom insolence or outright harassment. All this has been studied and well-documented. When I walk into a classroom I am immediately treated as an authority figure (whether or not I use the title), but my female colleagues â especially the young-looking ones â have the extra task of getting students to take them seriously.
While I donât need to use the title to get personal respect, I do anyway as this helps reinforce respect for the title among the students. (Actually, I usually have the students call me âProfâ rather than âDrâ, as it is generally harder to become a professor than to earn a PhD.) By helping to give the title power, it makes it easier for women and minorities to draw on that power by using the title themselves. (Plus, male professors trying to âbreak down barriersâ by insisting undergraduates call them by their first names always seem to me either to be suffering from Peter Pan syndrome or to be trying to sleep with students.)
Of course, there is also a problem with male faculty disrespecting their female colleagues, but (a) that is getting better - I think - and (b) that has nothing to do with titles, as outside of a few fields we donât tend to use them among ourselves. (Perhaps we should!)
6 Likes
I remember my Physics I class was co-taught between a man and woman professor. Never was the difference between the way the (mostly male) class treated both genders more clear to me.
I would like to challenge this with an anecdote. My one experience with this was in my linear algebra class. We had one male professor who went by âdoctorâ or âprofessorâ (letâs call him Euler) interchangeably as many do. Then we had a substitute professor who went by (letâs call him) âJohn.â Both white. Doctor Euler would have students in the back who were those people who donât know how to whisper. As in, they think theyâre whispering, but it just comes across as raspier speech at normal volume. They never seemed to shut up.
John Von Neumann walks in one day and tells us all to call him John, because he doesnât like honorifics. Whispering starts. Right away John goes, âExcuse me? Iâm talking right now. Is this going to be a problem?â Whispering stops and never starts again. The respect was palpable.
6 Likes
I have to agree. The way I read it, it comes across as an examination of authorial intent when it comes to symbolism, and he sounds like heâs first saying that no matter the speakerâs intent, itâs how a message is interpreted by the listener that matters, and then he seems to say that a listenerâs understanding should not be contrary to a broadly established consensus view of what the speaker is trying to say, also implying that the speakerâs intent is in line with that consensus.
I get that heâs trying to say that Black Lives Matter comes from a moral and ethical standpoint that is contrary to the letter writersâ viewpoint, no matter how many racists there are who believe otherwise, but I think he could have made that point more effectively. By his argument, disgruntled Southerners could maintain that the Confederate battle flag means only what its standard-bearers intended it to mean, and that if millions of other people only associate it with violent, evil oppression, well, itâs their misunderstanding for assigning that meaning to the flag when such meaning was not the intended message of its creators.
Itâs a subtle distinction, but though I agree with his overall message, I think he might have addressed the tension between intent and reception a bit more directly.
2 Likes
The problem for me is that the existence of the privileged white male with a doctorate seems to negate the idea that a high level degree and the title it comes with means that the person deserves respect. Iâve met activists without GEDs who do more for their community than college professors with doctorates who espouse conservative political agendas during lectures on apolitical topics such as computer science. Iâd rather have a title of respect for the activist than pretend like the amount of time Dr. Joe Smith spent in school means that his derision and thinly-veiled bigotry entitle him to respect by default.
That is not to diminish the efforts of POCs and women who earn such degrees, but I just donât know how as a society we would collectively say POCS and women with doctorates are deserving of respect while privileged white males with doctorates arenât necessarily without setting off a Fox News-inciting dumpster fire of a debate. Maybe thatâs just a fault of my lack of imagination though.
Agreed. Iâm sure you know Iâm not saying that one precludes the other. All of us deserve respect for the work we did. I donât and wouldnât argue other wise. Since I come from working class families on both side, I totally agree with this. But again, I donât think anything I said implied that it wasnât true - just for the record. I have never nor would I even assume that the work I do makes me better than anyone else on this planet.
Okay. Itâs not been my experience or what Iâve read about academia as a general field. Clearly, you wonât take my word for it, so I suppose weâre at an impasse on this point. No hard feelings, though.
Along lines of race, too. I think my personal experiences, those of my colleagues (grad students, lecturers, and tenure/tenure track profs) and much of the actual research being done confirm thisâŠ
6 Likes
Women and POC, across the board, get less respect in a number of places or fields, where white men get it automatically, whether they are doctors, professors, whalers, soldiers, or auto mechanicsâŠ
No one here is saying that an academic is a better person or the only kind of person who works hard or deserves respect for that or that people who are academics are doing something so specialized that it outshines the work on other fields. Weâre saying that white men who are in academia tend to get it by default NO MATTER WHAT THEY DO OR HOW THEY ACT compared to their women or POC colleagues. Thatâs it. It says nothing about elitism or the relationship between academia as a general field and other kinds of labor.
5 Likes
I can definitely accept that this is the case in many places, probably a heck of a lot more than not, and Iâm not going to be solipsist and pretend like if I donât see it, it must not be true. I have a limited perspective based on my own experience and I do know that I live and work in a very liberal area where, despite some of this probably still happening a lot, it is likely less noticeable than in other places where there is a much smaller percentage of POCs and women in higher positions in academia. Most of our higher level administrators and department chairs are females and often POCs, so it feels like privileged white males stand out more when theyâre colossal bigots.
Weâve agreed significantly on what seems like a thousand other topics, so Iâm fine with conceding this one.
Okay. Iâm not disagreeing about white male professors either. Iâve seen plenty who use their privilege and their position in an egregious way - again, this is my personal experience, and seems to have some backing in people who write about this stuff more broadly. White men are more likely to proceed along the tenure track faster and are more likely to receive tenure track jobs. They are more likely to be taken seriously at conferences, to get more attention when they are on the floor speaking, to get less challenging questions,or to be given more leeway when unable to answer those questions in such settings. Plenty use their title and position to be bullies and jerks and it sucks. I totally get that and I donât think youâre wrong on that count.
I just feel youâre conflating what that privileged group does with their title and position to people who, while they have that title and some privilege, arenât in possession of all of that privilege afforded white men in our society. It seems like youâre saying that when women and POC ask for the same respect a white man gets just by being there, that itâs equivalent to a already privileged person using their title to stroke their ego. Thatâs likely not what you meant or mean, but itâs how weâre perceiving it here, from what weâre reading.
Indeed! 
No hard feelings at all! You donât need to concede, but I sort of felt like I was not being heard fully on the point I was trying to make.
[ETA] On the topic of administration having more women and POC there, you also have to look at who is ultimately at the top and the fact that many are women and POC, who might have not found tenure track jobs, or who did so well in the field of service work to the university, that they ended up getting administrative jobs⊠I think itâs generally true that white men still tend to get the opportunity to immerse themselves in their research, more so than women. Itâs another reason why many women dragging on getting tenture - more service work.
4 Likes
4 Likes
Well Iâm a privileged white male, so Iâm not used to listening to other people thoroughly because of the voice in my head telling me how awesome I must be all the time. Heâs really a dick sometimes.
6 Likes
This might be a bit broad for your plan of study (and hats off to you for that!), this is more exploring the larger issue of identity, how we come by it, its use and abuse. I used it as a reference for a sermon I delivered a few years ago (my Unitarian Universalist church makes opportunities for plain folk like me to occupy the pulpit and speak).
A couple sample passages:
Taking the line of least resistance we lump the most different people together under the same heading. Taking the line of least resistance, we ascribe to them collective crimes, collective acts and opinions. âthe Serbs have massacredâŠ,â âthe English have devastatedâŠ,â âthe Jews have confiscatedâŠ,â the Blacks have torchedâŠ," âthe Arabs refuseâŠâ. We blithely express sweeping judgements on whole peoples, calling them âhardworkingâ and âingenious,â or âlazy,â âtouchy,â âsly,â âproud,â or âobstinateâ. And sometimes this ends in bloodshed.
"Consider the case of a Serbian man and a Muslim woman who met 35 years ago in a café in Sarajevo, fell in love and got married. They can never perceive their identities in the same way as a couple that is entirely Serbian or entirely Muslim; their views of religion and mother country will never again be what it was. Both partners will always carry within them the ties their parents handed down from birth, but they will forever be seen in a different light and with a different importance.
Now let us stay in Sarajevo, and do an imaginary survey. We observe a man in the street who appears to be about 50. In 1980 he might have told us proudly "I'm a Yugoslavian!". Questioned more closely, he tells us that he was a citizen of the Federal Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and incidentally, that he came from a traditionally Muslim family.
Twelve years later, when the war was at it's height, he might have answered automatically and emphatically "I'm a Muslim!". He might have even grown the statutory beard. He would quickly have added that he was Bosnian, but would not have been happy to be reminded how proudly he once identified himself as Yugoslavian.
How would he define himself today? European? Islamic? Bosnian? Balkan? Who can say?"
1 Like
Well, as hard as it is to imagine von Neumann sleeping with students or asking them to call him âJohnâ (you do know that he was the model for Dr. Strangelove, donât you?), I donât think that wanting students to shut up and listen to you is incompatible with wanting to sleep with them; they can both be artifacts of narcissism.
The solution to get more respect to people who deserve it is not to remove it from others that deserve it too.
The question of whether a person who sets up a homeless shelter does more for society than someone who creates a new algorithm is an interesting one, but probably beyond the scope of this thread.
Yes, probably (though I havenât sen that research). The title confers an unquestionable legitimacy that people in power might not otherwise be willing to give.
There is also a matter of self-confidence. I have colleagues who are second-or-higher generation faculty, and they seem to have never questioned their legitimacy as professors. By contrast, impostor syndrome is a huge deal for people who donât fit the traditional faculty stereotype. This includes women and minorities, but can also include younger faculty in general, or those who were 1st-gen college students. The use of the title can help such a faculty member hold onto their sense that they belong where they are.
Perhaps it is another place where use of titles could be helpful. It might be easier for a chair to say, âMindy, do this necessary task we donât respect or count for tenureâ than âDoctor Professor San, please do this necessary task we donât respect or count for tenureâŠâ
4 Likes
I hope you donât think thatâs what I was saying, cause it wasnât, I promise! 
1 Like
Imposter syndrome? Whatâs that? I donât have that, like everyday of my life⊠no sir! Nope. Not a bit!
9 Likes
TRUTH.
And SO few men see it happening.
If you meant that, without sarcasm, then kudos to you. If you were being sarcastic, well, I am disappointâŠ[quote=âanon61221983, post:142, topic:81178â]
Imposter syndrome? Whatâs that? I donât have that, like everyday of my life⊠no sir! Nope. Not a bit!
[/quote]
Hmm, yeah. Well, if itâs any help, itâs been more than obvious while reading what you write here for a long time that you definitely deserve a seat at the academic table, not to mention the accompanying title.
2 Likes
