This thread has shown up a lot of different traditions and ideas about the use of the title “Professor”. As described in williambaskerville’s post, the usage seems to be quite different on this side of the Atlantic.
Here, a lecturer, however senior, whether or not he/she has “tenure” or a doctorate, is not referred to as a professor or addressed as “Professor” even informally. A professor is normally a head of department; there may be other endowed professorships. In any event, it is a particular job to which one may be appointed, and not a courtesy title. A student who wrongly called a lecturer “Professor” would be corrected immediately, and a lecturer who falsely held him/herself out to be a professor would be considered to be acting fraudulently.
The best analogy I can think of is priests and bishops. A priest may be well-respected, have a doctorate, and have served for a long time. But that doesn’t make him a bishop, and nobody calls him a bishop.
Huh – I didn’t know that (I thought it had to do with experience and promotion – or in the case of Holby City, vicious backstabbing and sleeping with everyone in your department, &c). Thanks!
“reverend” is an adjective not a noun. No one is properly called “Rev. Jones”, it is “the reverend Jones” even though most people don’t know it or use it this way.
Go off the beam and make soap. All-one! (See Cecil’s column, which Wiki cites.*)
Invent celery soda, and change the relation of man and pastrami forever.
*But which, in some important and interesting places, Cecil gives no cites. It’s moments like these that make me question my faith.
I experienced the tradition of using Mr./Mrs./Ms at the University of Chicago. I also had to learn to address my adviser and teachers by their first name when I became a grad student; that was jarring. I remember my adviser correcting a reference I made in my thesis to one of his fellow faculty members: I think I wrote Dr. Soandso and he told me to write Mel Soandso instead.
But my favorite comment on all this comes from Miss Manners. I hope I’m allowed to quote this small passage, discussing titles in academia:
“Miss Manners’ own dear father, who would never allow himself to be addressed as doctor, used to say that a Ph.D. was like a nose—you don’t make a fuss about having one because you assume that everyone does; it’s only when you don’t have one that is conspicuous.”
Notwithstanding the fact that California is known for informality, and allowing for the fact that most of my postsecondary schooling was ages ago, a majority of the professors I had preferred to be addressed as Doctor Lastname, while the remainder asked their students to use their first names. For some reason “Professor” as a prenominal title was very rarely heard or used.
For some reason I agree that “Professor” strikes me as a more impressive title. Oddly enough, however, the original meaning of Doctor was “teacher”, as in “doctrine”.
At UCSD, when I was there in the late 1970s, Mr. or Ms _____ was how the instructor would be listed in the printed class schedule, but when addressing them directly we usually called them Doctor ____.
Regarding my last post I think a contributing factor might have been that I was studying German literature, and had a number of visiting or immigrant German professors who were probably used to the more formal customs of German universities. But then that might equally well have been said of most American professors in those days. Younger visiting professors who dressed casually and wore their hair long* tended to identify with left-leaning student movements of the 1960s, and often preferred to be called by first name. The same, of course, was true of visiting graduate student teachers.
*Not that hair length was so much a symbol of rebellion by this time, but 30- or 40-year old instructors tended to leave their hair long if they’d worn it that way as students.
In Spain you used to be able to style yourself a Bachiller if you had a Bachillerato, but that’s back when it was a university degree. Nowadays it’s HS and nobody uses it any more. There’s characters in many old novels who are identified as “Bachiller soandso”; the one in El Quijote is Bachiller Sansón Carrasco.
Middlebro and I have college degrees in Engineering, therefore we’re Ingenieros (Name). SiL and Littlebro have Licenciaturas, so they’re both Licenciados (Name). Again, those are rarely used as prenominal titles but you often find them used that way in older novels.
In all three cases the usage changes from when the titleholder is referred in the third person (“I was talking to Bachiller Carrasco”) or adressed directly (“excuse me, Señor Bachiller, what do you think about the news?”).
People with Licenciaturas in Medicine are called doctores although they don’t usually have doctorates, while people who have doctorates but not in Medicine are rarely called doctores.
I made a HUGE fuss about being properly identified as an Ingeniero and not a Licenciado once. My employers had transferred me back to Spain after a stint abroad, and the new contract identified my “highest degree” as “Licenciado/a”. I refused to sign the contract until it was corrected, since a “ChemE degree” gave me possible access to more lines of work than a “Bachelor’s in Chemistry”.
There are some sectors in which you get paid differently for similar job titles based on your degree; Littlebro’s job title is “administrativo” but he’s got a Licenciatura and he’s the Controller (Overseas Subsidiaries); the woman who files things for him is an “administrativa” too, but she’s got a vocational degree she got at age 16 and she makes lots of photocopies. In those sectors, having your degree be “recognized” is a huge deal.
Same thing up here. Our MD isn’t a doctorate, but you’ll see “Dr. Soandso” on any MD’s office door. If I feel particularly snarky, I might ask the good doctor about what subject s/he took his/her doctorate in. Just to bring attention to the difference between being called “doctor” and having a doctorate.
In fact, our MDs are more or less the only ones who routinely use the “Dr” honorific around here. ETA: except for the occasional gasbag. Almost no real doctors - be they PhDs, DScs or other types of doctors - only use those titles on their business cards and nowhere else.
My experience at a US (Ivy) school was that calling yourself “doctor” if you weren’t a member of a medical profession was, as one earlier poster suggested, the height of pompous “douchebaggery.” Except for the fellow who ran the campus infirmary, even Nobel laureates just used “professor.” To do otherwise was to invite derision.
Since college, my experience has been that when I encounter a non-medical person who calls himself (or herself) “doctor,” they tend to be people with doctorates in fields that aren’t all that academically rigorous (educational administration as opposed to physics) or from less-than-stellar institutions.
When my husband was dean at a community college, his teachers all had either masters degrees or doctorates. The latter were addressed as Dr., and the former were universally called “teachers.”
As for the earlier post about everyone having a PhD having earned it, not always so. My father, who had earned his, worked for a businessman who had had an honorary conferred doctorate. He called himself “Dr. X,” to the great irritation of his employees who had earned theirs, and the amusement of everyone else. He was also an adjunct at a local college, where he insisted on being addressed as Dr.
I come from a scientific-academic background. Everyone in the family had a doctorate, and everyone was always addressed as Dr. Maybe it’s because all their friends and colleagues were in the same boat, but that’s how it was. My husband doesn’t use his Dr. title, but his students used to. I’ve found it’s handy when you want to get a table at a good restaurant on a busy night.