"Leader DeLay"??? What's up with that?

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:32 PM -0500 5/14/05, Barbara Need wrote:
>>One of my professors goes by her first name with graduate students but
>>prefers undergraduates to call her Dr., specifically because one does
>>not have to hold a Ph.D. to lecture at my university. She told me that
>>she would be fine without that title if she were teaching at an
>>institution where all teaching were doctors.
>>
>>
>>-Lal
>>
>>Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>>>
>>>An old study (source forgotten) relates "Dr." and "Professor" titles
>>>to prestige of institution. More prestige, less doctoring and
>>>professoring.
>>>
>>>dInIs
>
>At the University of Chicago, professors are (traditionally) called
>Mr or Mrs/Ms/Miss, not Doctor, not Professor. Someone once explained
>this to me, but I don't remember what the UofC rationale was.

Probably the same as at Yale (we do share that [+ gothic] feature,
after all), where "Mr. X" was de rigueur for men, and "Miss/Mrs. X"
for women (this was when institutions like Yale and the N. Y. Times
didn't deign to recognize "Ms.").   So it was Mr. Bloch  and Miss
Haas and such.  But then first-naming came in, along with jeans and
such, before I arrived in '81, and it's been downhill ever since.
The rationale for the earlier practice as stated to me was that it
was assumed that everyone at Yale is both a professor and a PhD, so
it would be infra dig to flaunt such titles.

Larry