S. Worthen | Weblog

I think that since all the positions from 'lecturer' up in the UK are tenured they all equate to "professor+" in the US. In particular, "reader", is a pretty senior (and not very common) title. In the UK profs are addressed formally as "Professor X" and everybody else as "Doctor X" (assuming they have a doctorate). In practice in my department we used first names except for the full profs and a few geriatric lecturers.

Probably worth pointing out that university and college titles almost always (depends a bit on context) trump departmental ones in the UK and are used without the incumbent's surname. Thus Peter Bayley who was Professor of English and Master of Collingwood was addressed simply as "Master" in college but, presumably as "Professor Bayley" in the department. The Vice Chancellor, despite also being a professor of engineering was always "Vice Cnancellor".

Can't really be helpful here: though I sometimes think I'm as annoyed by the people who call me Professor as a default (hello? if you know who I am - and since you usually want me to write you an article I assume you must do - you should know I'm not employed in the university system!) as by those who address me as '[firstname]' in initial email/letter contact. Also, I like being Dr because not only does it get over the whole Miss/Mrs/Ms thing that so many people still fail to get their heads around, it also makes me completely gender-neutral, since startingly few people get the (there is one) gendered spelling of my first name. I take malicious pleasure in this.

Oh my. It depends so much on the place in the US. my last CC (Community College) one was an Instructor till one had tenure (a three-year process) and then one became Professor witht the consent of the Faculty Senate. And it never mattered, except on business cards. So there were people with MAs who were professors and PhDs who were adjunct faculty ... and half the people who teach there go by first name.

My new place, one is allowed to choose one's title, pretty much. I tell my students they can call me Dr. ADM or A, but not MS or Mrs or Miss. At Beachy U, we called pretty much all our faculty Dr, unless someone pulled us aside and told us it was Professor or the faculty members told us to call them by their first names. At Grad U, most of the tenured faculty were still Dr, the dinosaurs were Professor, and the associate faculty, who were only a few years ahead of the grad students, were first-name folks.

Oh -- I just remembered I did a summer course at Warwick with Jack Scarisbrick once. The first day of class, some big-haired girl from Texas announced to him that in the US, we always called profs by their first names, and could we just call him Jack, or JJ? About half of us cringed, and about a third of us continued to call him Professor, as did the English students helping out on the course.

Oh -- and Germany? My advisor there was Herr Doktor (Doktor) Professor. He had two doctorates, and had DDP on his nameplate, but we only had to say the DOktor once. In a pinch, we were allowed to say Herr Professor.

Can you tell I haven't had my tea yet? I think chilperic is probably the best equipped to answer this with authority, btw.

At Harvard, the staff were adamant that professors of any level be addressed only as Doctor or Professor, and you weren't supposed to contact them by e-mail or phone directly--you were to contact their staff assistant only. The professors themselves had different takes on this, of course. My advisor preferred Kevin, and many other profs went by their first names. Some went by their last names, no title. And some were to be called Doctor or Professor or God help you. This was at the Divinity School, which is probably less formal-feeling as the Harvard schools go, so who knows how much more strict it may've been elsewhere at Harvard.

At RPI, my undergraduate institution, the physics department was less formal. There were no stern lectures from the staff about how we must always address the professors formally, and we were *supposed* to contact them directly. That may have been facilitated by the fact that the department was small and at an institution that gets far fewer press calls than Harvard.

In Canada, or at least in the part of Canada I'm in now, what are called "adjuncts" in the U.S. are called "sessionals". And I've never seen adjuncts called "professors" either here or in the U.S.; they are always called "instructors."

Where I am now, an "adjunct" is someone who teaches or oversees theses in a different department than the one in which s/he is housed. "Dr. Jones has tenure in the history department but she is an adjunct in Political Science."

You might want to add "endowed chair" to the North America side of your first category?

In North America, I think "Dr." is the safest way to address a university teacher, and it's how I prefer to be addressed. As you've no doubt heard me rant before, I really hate it when students assume (just because I am young and a woman) that I'm their buddy and they can call me by my first name.

My mother-in-law is an Associate Professor at an American University, who worked her way up from temporary adjunct faculty to I've asked her about this exact thing once in the past (right after she finished her doctorate as a matter of fact), but I forget exactly what she said because I still call her Mom or Bobby (Roberta).

When I was in college the dinosaurs were introduced as Professor but were called Doctor Soandso or Professor Soandso about equally. I don't recall being corrected on mistitling anyone except w/ adjunct faculty, who were very strict about being called Mr./Miss/Mrs vice Professor.

I did have an adjunct faculty for Gen Psych who had her doctorate & she definitely preferred Doctor vice Mrs. (understandably). Many of my professors had nicknames that they made us aware of on the first day of class. I had a Physics Prof. who liked to be called Mr. G (his name was Italian & many students would butcher the pronounciation) even though he had his doctorate & another one (who was a Distinguished Prof.) preferred to be called "Tibby" (short for Thibadeau). Granted this wasn't an Ivy league college, so I'd expect things weren't as formal. /shrug

hmmmm. Adjunct is weird. It started as something that was not bad -- people in other professions or other departments who occasionally taught in a particular department -- so a history prof as an adjunct in WS, or a prominent lawyer who taught a class a year. Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, and Clarence Thomas are all adjunct faculty at Emory, I believe. But now adjunct can mean any contingent, non-tenured/non-tenure-track faculty (not a grad student). There are als 'visiting' faculty -- people who hold short-term appointments. The position I hold now is technically a one-year instructor position, but I know people who hold exactly the same sort of position at Research I schools, and the hold the title of Visiting Assistant Professor and Visiting Lecturer. So who knows?