American English: are all teachers at tertiary level called "professors"?

Factual Questions
21

Another non-professorial-rank academic who has been frequently called “Professor” by undergrad students checking in here.

One point that I don’t think has been brought up yet is that students find the term “Professor” convenient for addressing faculty-type-people whose names they don’t happen to know. If I’m in my office doing faculty-type-stuff with the door open and a student passes by looking for the restroom or whatever, they can just say “Excuse me, Professor, can you tell me…?”* You can’t really do that with the title “Doctor” unattached to a name, unless it’s a medical doctor you’re talking to.
*Some students just say “Excuse me” (or “Hi” or “Yo”, for that matter) with no honorific at all, but most seem to consider it polite to use one. In the Netherlands it seemed to be routine for students to say “mevrouw” (“madam, ma’am”: i.e., the non-academic standard female honorific) if they didn’t know who I was. But I have never heard an American student address me as “ma’am” or “madam”.

22

A reasonable number of schools hire non-tenure-line, full-time instructional staff on a year-to-year or two-year contract. They may be called “adjunct” but there was a hiring process (rather than pulling one from the pool).

To confuse things further, your rank and your title may not be the same, and you may carry rank with you from a previous institution.

I am an “adjunct assistant professor” by title, though my rank is “instructor.” By university decree I may drop the “adjunct” designation on business cards and in describing myself (e.g., at a presentation). I am a non-tenure-line hire (that is, there is no research/productivity demand on me and I teach a lot of classes.)

I am on an annual contract that totals full time (more on this in the next paragraph). I started as a “visiting assistant profesor” but moved over to “adjunct assistant professor” after a hiring process. Either way, I’m in my 7th year of working here full time.

Since my contract (the amount of my time that I spend at the job for which I was hired) is at the .5 level, and I fill in the other .5 with work contracted by other programs (but for which there was not a search to fill me position), I am actually in two different statuses, both referred to as “adjunct” but one eligible for cost of living increases in the last round of raises, the other not. Since I receive one paycheck that does not separate my adjunct pay from my adjunct pay, oh, the fun we have making sure I have been paid correctly.

It recently became clear that this university system has no mechanism for promoting full-time, long-term, non-tenure-line faculty; even though we had been told that if we meet requirements for “tenure and promotion” (even though tenure cannot be extended to us), we could advance to “associate” or “full” professor. However, a recent test case revealed that this assertion is inaccurate because there is no specified evaluation process for this change of rank. If you’re in the middle of this, it’s fascinating and very emotional; if your not, it looks like people who are too obsessed with a role-playing game.

Meanwhile, at the community college I’m an “adjunct instructor.”

A few people call me “professor” (at the university), but most call me by my first name. I tell them that they can call me “First name” or “Dr. Surname,” but I’m not Mrs., Miss, Ms. or “Dr. [initial].”

23

To me, this strongly suggests that you have spent little time in the South, or with students from the South. I heard, on more than one occasion, a professor talking to a graduate student who had previously been instructed to call her by her first name “Not Professor X, just Eva” “I’m sorry ma’am” “Not ma’am, just Eva” “I’m sorry, ma’am”. He knew what she meant, but he *could not * overcome years of training and habit to drop the "ma’am"s and "sir"s his upbringing required.

Myself being a Northerner unused to such formalities, I just found the whole conversation amusing. So there are regions in the US where an American student might well address you as “ma’am”–and certainly regions where such a student would not be rude to not think of it.

24

I attended a Quaker college, which was very informal. We addressed our professors by their first names, with rare exceptions, and they called us by our first names. One professor preferred to be called Dr. LastName He, in turn, called us Ms. or Mr. LastName. One professor noted that if we were uncomfortable using first names, we could use Quaker formal address and call him FirstName LastName. Everyone just called him Rudy.

In my (non-Quaker) law school, all of the professors were called Professor.

25

I also went to a Friends’ college, and didn’t know until graduate school that some professors wanted to be called by something other than first name.

26

Another transatlantic difference - most British university staff, both lecturers and professors, will in the vast majority of cases have a PhD. The equivalent of two-year colleges and the like is known as ‘further education’ (degree-awarding courses being ‘higher education’), and the situation regarding staff sounds comparable, although it’s quite possible for a doctorate to end up teaching in such a position. Or indeed in schools (my father has a chemistry PhD and then decided he wanted to teach in primary schools).

27

I would have sent this email, but I can’t so . . . what school did you go to? I went to Guilford College, in Greensboro, NC.

28

When I taught in two-year colleges, I was Mr. Wombat early in the semester, but just called by my first name by the end. When I was an adjunct faculty member at a university, most of my students called me “the instructor” to each other and Mr. Wombat to my face. A few called me Professor out of habit, but I didn’t have the rank or the degree to warrant it.

Formal ranks and titles seem to be disappearing in the U.S. Once upon a time, you wouldn’t hold the title of Engineer unless you had a degree in engineering. Back in the days when I was working for larger companies, they tended to assign titles based on what they were paying you rather than your actual qualifications (e.g., I was a “Principal Programmer” at a Fortune 1000 computer company when I was only 20 years old with no college degree).

29

Sergeant Manatee? OK.

30

Others have already explained the rank structure (which does vary some from school to school, but not all that much). As for usage, in my experience:

A graduate student is almost universally addressed in the second by just first name, with no title. A few of my students (mostly international) are uncomfortable with this, and instead use Mr. Lastname. In the third person, it’s either first name, or “the TA” (if the context is such that that would be unambiguous).

Among non-students (postdocs and above) teaching a course, the students rarely if ever make any distinction. In the second person, it’s usually “Professor” without any name attached, or “Professor Lastname”, or “Doctor Lastname” (faculty in my field are almost universally doctors), or sometimes (depending on the level of familiarity between the teacher and students) just first name. In the third person, it’s “Professor Lastname”, “Doctor Lastname”, or first name. Whether one uses “Professor Lastname” or “Doctor Lastname” mostly seems to depend on whether the context is a course the student is taking from that faculty member. “Doctor” by itself, without a name attached, is never used.

31

From this I take it you mean that if I am enrolled in English 101, taught by Professor John Doe, Ph.D., then I think of him in the role of a “professor,” that is, “my teacher,” and am more likely to think of him as “Professor Doe.” Whereas if he is a professor at my university but I have never been in the position of being a student in his class, then I am more likely to think of him as “Doctor Doe.”

If that is what you’re saying, then I find it plausible, but it’s not a distinction that I recall being made in my experience.

32

I must add that in casual conversation, students are likely to refer to their professors in the third person simply by their family names – “I really like Doe’s class.” “Doe is such an asshole; I can’t believe he gave me a C.”

33

As a general rule if you’re unclear about someone’s proper title always choose the higher/more formal one and they can correct you. My junior college insists on refering to all faculty as Professor Lastname in official communications and publications, but nobody actually addresses them like that. The PhDs tend to prefer Dr Lastname, though one of my psych profs prefers Dr Firstname. The none PhDs are Mr/Ms/Mrs Lastname. Only our president insists on calling everbody Professor X. Most of the faculty seem to think he’s an ass.

34

In my (U.S.) experience, “professor” is also the common noun used to describe anyone (besides a TA) teaching a course at a college or university. You might ask a classmate, “What professors do you have this semester?” (Asking which classes is more common of course, but sometimes the class schedule doesn’t vary much within a program.) If the professor (there, I just did it) is late on the first day of class, someone might ask “Where’s the professor?” (especially if they don’t remember the person’s name).

In fact, I wouldn’t think it very odd to hear “Mr. Smith is the professor for that class; you probably don’t know him since he’s just a visiting instructor.”

35

Shagnasty writes:

> 4) Assistant professor - a newly hired person given the opportunity to make
> tenure in a small number of years or get out.
>
> 5) Associate professor - the first tenured rank. It isn’t that bad to stop here.
>
> 6) Professor - The top of these ranks. It is mainly for achievement in research
> and contributions to the department through things like committee work.

I have a friend who just got tenure in the standard way, after six years of teaching and knowing that she had to get it or find a new job. She was not automatically promoted from assistant professor to associate professor. She tells me that such promotion is a separate process at her university and will have to wait for next year.

It’s my observation that it’s generaly considered to be somewhat of a disapppointment if someone never gets promoted from associate professor to full professor.

36

I went to Swarthmore in Pennsylvania. A school with no graduate students, so I was never taught by a TA and never had to distinguish between them and professors.

37

Yeah, tapping into that whole “Adjuncts: Twice the Courses, Half the Pay” vibe.

38

Back in the 60s when I began, there were four levels (five if you considered graduate student TAs), including some named and high prestige instructorships (e.g. Peirce instructorships at Harvard), but soon the instructorships were replaced by assistant professorships and there were only three regular faculty grades, all called professorships. The students then called all of them “Professor”, since that was their title after all. Now there are a lot of “part-time” lecturers and I suspect that the students still call them professor. My department made hardly any use of them (except for one or two night courses, like actuarial science taught by working actuaries).

When I visited the University of Sydney, I was surprised that the department had only two professors. And I was told that in the old days they would have only one. Essentially professor meant dept head and you were that until you died (or retired). Then they created so-called personal professorships, but they were still limited in number.

FWIW, I never like being called Dr., but I did appreciate professor. Without meaning to put anyone down, there are so many DO, DChiro, DVM, DDiv, whatnot,…, not to mention honorary doctorates around that it never seemed like much of a distinction, while professor is. I feel it is a real clunker when the NY Times refers to distinguished researchers as Dr. so and so, rather than professor.