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

[George Thompson]

when I was in graduate school at Boston University in 1964, the
department head (if I recall) said not to address members of the
department (the English Dept.) as Dr., because "we all have doctorates
here"

Some years ago I heard an elderly jazz musician interviewed who was
teaching music at an university somewhere.  The interviewer asked him
how he liked his new position.  He said he liked it very much, the
students were all so eager and talented, and he was happy to see that
the music was going to be in such good hands in the next generation.
There was only one thing that bothered him.  When his students spoke to
him, when they asked a question in class or met him on the campus, they
would always address him as Professor.  Now, when he was coming up, a
professor was a man who played piano in a whore house, and so, to him,
it was a term of opprobrium.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: Roger Shuy <rshuy at MONTANA.COM>
Date: Sunday, May 15, 2005 8:15 am
Subject: Re: "Leader DeLay"??? What's up with that?

> on 5/14/05 10:19 PM, Laurence Horn at laurence.horn at YALE.EDU wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> > Subject:      Re: "Leader DeLay"??? What's up with that?
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
> --> -
> >
> > 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
> >
> But I'll be you never had the problem that we had at Georgetown,
> where,after the Jesuits began wearing civies in public,
> Protestant male teachers
> like me sometimes very mistakenly got called Father.
>
> Roger
>