Are non-doctoral degrees associated with prenominal titles, at least in theory?

Factual Questions
42

It may be your opinion, but it’s quite incorrect. You’re a professor, and entitled to be called such, if your job title says “Professor,” regardless of whether or not you have been granted tenure yet. This includes Assistant Professors, who almost by definition haven’t received tenure. It would be absurd to refer to an Assistant Professor as a “Lecturer,” since that is a different job title. Most tenure-track academics will spend their first five to seven years as Assistant Professors before receiving tenure and being promoted to Associate Professor.

In my personal experience, at least at the universities I’ve attended it’s uncommon for students to refer to “Professor So and So” at all. It’s more usual just to refer to them as “Doctor.”

43

They would not, at least in the U.S. system. “Professor” is a job title at a university. Technically speaking, it has nothing to do with whether someone has a Ph.D. or not. Nowadays a Ph.D. is generally a job requirement for most positions that carry the title “Professor,” although there may be some exceptions.

Professors usually have teaching responsibilities, and will often have graduate students. But that doesn’t mean that people with doctorates who don’t have professorships are any less capable of teaching or training students.

I have a Ph.D. and work at a research institute rather than a university. I’m a “Doctor,” but not a “Professor,” and so are most of my colleagues. Many of them are highly distinguished and respected in their fields. There is no distinction in terms of prestige compared to people who hold university positions. That’s based on the record of publications, not job description. If anything, people here are envied because they don’t have to teach and can devote all their time to research.

However, many of them do have pre-doctoral and post-doctoral students who work in their labs. (The pre-docs at least have to have a university affiliation elsewhere, even if they do their research here.) I’m on a couple of academic committees myself, even though I’m not a professor.

44

Yeah; unlike elementary or high school teachers, college/university professors don’t have some additional training or certification they have to have in order to “train others to that level.” It’s the academic degree itself (and the fact that some institution is willing to hire them) that certifies them qualified to “profess.”

45

At every single university I was affiliated with, as a student or professor, you could only get away being called “professor” is that word was part of your job title. E.g., visiting, adjunct, assistant, associate, (full), etc.

Being a professor requires a better educational background, more extensive check on credentials, more letters of reference, etc. It is not taken lightly and usurping the title is not allowed.

A lecturer or instructor using the title “professor” would be quickly told the rules of the system. They would go by Mr./Ms, etc. or “doctor” if they had that degree.

46

A culturally interesting datapoint: IME, in Scandinavia, even full professors are usually addressed by their first name only by their domestic (grad) students. Sometimes last name only, and if you’re just taking the course the professor is giving, it’s often by last name only. Almost never by “Professor”, never by “Doctor”.

Foreign exchange students, though, use the “Professor” honorific, regardless of whether the “professor” is a full professor or an adjunct/assistant/associate professor. I’ve also heard “Professor <firstname>” used by foreign students.

I still remember the German exchange student who was flabbergasted when I, as a grad student, hailed my professor in the corridor: “Hey, Mike, I really need to talk to you one of these days. ASAP!”. :smiley: We’re not particularly preoccupied with on honorifics in Scandinavia :cool: And anyone insisting on being addressed as “Doctor”, “Professor” or whatever would be perceived as an incurable snob.

47

I’m a graduate student, and I call my advisor by his first name or by his nickname, and I use “tu” (the informal pronoun) with him. Actually, I do the same with most of the professors at my department, but it’s because I see them relatively often. I’m more formal with professors from other institutions whom I don’t know very well.

From what I can see, undergraduate students at my department usually address the professors formally, using “vous” and calling them “Professor”.

48

They are definitely also a professor! Lecturers however, are not professors. They don’t do research and so don’t deserve the title, formally, IMHO :wink:

49

Some lecturers do research. They’re not addressed as professors because their job title is not professor.

50

They can, but very few seem to. Still, I did recently receive some correspondence from the court, addressed to “D. Spoons, Esq.” That was kind of nice!

51

I wouldn’t say very few. Any sort of sign or official correspondence will use the title. For instance, nearly every nameplate on the buzzers to let people into buildings around here is either prefixed Dott. or Dott.ssa. When I first moved here I thought I was moving into a very upscale building: all those GPs and PhDs! Alas, no; just undergraduates.

52

Only in America. (Well, at least, certainly not in the U.K.) I felt quite uncomfortable when I began teaching at an American university and all the students insisted on addressing me as “professor”.

Mind you, just about anyone can be a professor of sticking bits and pieces of stuff to a board. :stuck_out_tongue:

53

Ah, apologies if I was misunderstood. I meant that locally, very few use the “Esq.” title. Most often, local law firm letterheads, names on offices, business cards, etc., simply list the lawyers’ names, along with their degrees (for example, “John Smith, B.A., LL.B.”). And generally, official correspondence between lawyers simply uses a name–no degrees, no “Esq.”, which is why I was rather tickled to have “Esq.” added after my name on my recent correspondence from the court.

54

Outside the US, many universities have a fixed number of professorships (sort of like named professorial chairs in the US academic system). Only people holding one of these professorships are entitled to be addressed as “Professor”.

In the US, as has been noted, “Professor” and “Associate Professor” designate somebody who’s received tenure, while “Assistant Professor” is somebody who will be considered for tenure after a fixed interval but has not yet received it. I don’t think anybody’s yet mentioned the various “Visiting _______ Professor” positions (one of which I currently hold at a US college), which mean that you have a fixed-term appointment and are not tenured (though you might be tenured at a different institution).

But yes, it is common in US academia for students to call any faculty member “Professor”, and that’s how most of us faculty members refer to another faculty member in the third person when speaking to a student. It would seem kind of silly and undemocratic to be meticulous about reserving the “Professor ____” nomenclature only for faculty members who actually have “Professor” somewhere in their formal job titles. (Although Lord knows there’s nothing particularly democratic about the academic job hierarchy itself.)

Americans have always been pretty lavish in the use of the title “Professor”, compared to Europeans. I’ve read American books from many decades ago in which “Professor” was used either formally or informally when addressing a phrenologist, a conjurer, a racehorse handicapper, and a boarding-school headmaster: none of whom, it pretty much goes without saying, held any kind of university professorship. “Professor” as a title of respect more or less meant “Smart Person”.

It’s similar to the now-obsolete American custom of referring to prominent local magnates as “Colonel” or “General”, even if they’d never actually served in the military, meaning more or less “Important Person”.

55

The Old Perfessor.

56

And to think I just always used either Dr. or Mr.

57

Nothing actually wrong with either of those; I have students who use “Ms.”, “Miss” or “Mrs.” (apparently indifferently and interchangeably, since we’ve never actually discussed my marital status in class) to address me, and that’s perfectly okay.

As D18 noted previously, some high-ranking institutions used to make rather a fuss about a sort of reverse-snobbery honorific system, where nobody was officially referred to as “Professor” or “Dr.” but rather just as “Mr./Ms./Mrs./Miss”.

The underlying reasoning, AFAICT, was both egalitarian (because we don’t address our fancypants full-professor types any differently from our lowly adjuncts) and snobbish (because we take having a PhD and/or a professorship so much for granted in our faculty members that we don’t have to keep calling attention to it in their honorifics).

Apparently, UChicago still maintains the same attitude about this that D18 remembered:

Most institutions, though, have succumbed to the pressures of academic prestige, and you wouldn’t catch them neglecting any opportunity to refer to their faculty members by the most impressive honorifics that they’re entitled to use.

58

This derives from that through American history it was not uncommon for “prominent local magnates” to at some point or another have been awarded a command rank in the local militia, in the olden times nominally real (but only to be used in a callup of volunteers), later on merely honorary; this still carries on to this day with the best known example being us Kentucky Colonels.

59

University of Virginia, among its many traditions, has its instructors and professors all go by Ms or Mr whether they have a PhD or not – it’s all about Thos Jefferson’s abhorence of titles. I had professors there who would actually scold you if you called them Dr or Professor.

In my current program, we do not offer tenure even though we do have full-time faculty and certainly promotion (mine is what they call, I think, a ‘bridge program’ as our students can finish at the AA degree, or go on to the main campus to complete their Bachelors), but all PhD’d faculty in the program are recognised as Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor officially by the program’s guidelines and the main university’s criteria. Non-PhDs are instructors. The pay scale reflects this as well – as a new Assistant Professor I was paid more than a colleague who’d been there as a full-time, published instructor since the early '80s.

My students, especially the freshmen, frequently call me Miss or Ms (and the occasional ‘Mrs’ but I do correct them that Mrs Boods is my mother, but I’d be more than happy to turn over their marking and grades to her if they’d like); I, like Dr Evil mentioned above, remind them that I didn’t spend years in evil grad school to be called Miss or Ms. (Freshmen have also asked me if they can call me by my first name – sure, as long as they remember that my first name is ‘Doctor’ or ‘Professor.’ I have no problems with my grad students, however, calling me by my first name, especially as our primary contact is through a teaching-training program I’m a part of.)

I did have correspondence from colleagues at a German university for a while, so it was entertaining to be addressed as Frau Professor Doktor.

I’m an assistant professor now, and as such in the US can be addressed as Professor or Doctor Boods. But next autumn, I will be a lecturer in the UK, so I will just be Doctor Boods – Professor is an entirely different animal, usually venerable, highly-published, senior members of their departments (who might get quite cross with you if you slip up and call them Doctor instead of Professor.)

Then there’s that whole thing in the UK where you spend ages qualifying to be a medical doctor, and get called that until you get promoted to a higher position, and become Mr/Mrs/Ms! At least this is what about a thousand episodes of Casualty and Holby City have taught me over the years (they’ve also taught me that the minute you have to go in for surgery, even if it’s just for a hangnail, you’re dead. Unless you’re part of the main ensemble – then you can be up and about a day or two after major brain surgery/organ transplant/point-blank gunshot wound to the chest, etc. Neat!)

60

Interesting! I did not know that.

61

It’s true that here in Ireland and in Britain a consultant surgeon is styled “Mr”, “Mrs” or “Miss”, and that this is an earned title considered more prestigious than “Dr”. It’s not about being promoted though; as I understand it, it’s a further qualification.