Professors and doctors

[Damien Hall]

Pardon my lateness;  this thread is really over for the time being, but I'm just
getting back to e-mail after a few days away from it, and I see that no-one
chipped in about British customs when the thread was still actually running.

It's a long e-mail and contains some personal reflections about what I think
inspires the difference between British and American habits of academic
address.  I put this here as a warning to people not interested in the topic;
go ahead and delete this!  But I would be very interested in what anyone who
*is* interested thinks of my reasoning.  Perhaps anyone who can be bothered
could reply to me off-list.

(For the record, my girlfriend, a Bryn Mawr alumna - aka a Mawrtyr, which is how
I remember that it's /brIn ma:r/, not /mo:r/ - says that there, as
in other places that have been mentioned, the custom in formal settings is to
call everyone Mr, Mrs and, proudly, Miss:  the instructors both get these
titles from the students and give them to them.  I don't know whether the
custom is likely to have changed since she graduated, which was in 1986.)

Anyway, the British stuff.  (All these comments should, of course, be taken to
refer to use in formal settings.)  At the places I graduated from (Oxford,
Cambridge and the London School of Economics), at least, the custom is to give
everyone their full academic title;  I've never heard of using Mr, Mrs, Miss
and Ms because everyone would be assumed to have a doctorate.

(The people on the list who know about the British academic system should please
accept my apologies in advance and not think that I'm trying to teach my granny
to suck eggs!)

I think that the conscious use of titles in formal settings might be down to two
things:

1.  Not everyone teaching *does* actually have a doctorate.  Admittedly, that's
much, much less true now than it used to be.  Peter Parsons, the
recently-retired Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, never got his doctorate;
he was advised in the early '50s that he might as well not bother going through
the rigour of formally qualifying because it was perfectly clear to everyone
that he would have a splendid academic career, so they would just give him a
job.  They were right.

Apart from a very small minority of full teaching staff, nowadays, most people
teaching at those places who do not have doctorates are Lecteurs / Lectrices in
foreign languages (substitute appropriate language and gender here), recent
graduates of foreign Universities and native speakers of languages taught at
the University who are employed for a year to help modern-languages students
with their spoken proficiency.

2.  Over there, Professor is actually a rank higher than Doctor, not simply a
job title.  (As such, of course, it's always capitalised.)  There is usually
only one Professor per department, the department head;  others who have had a
particularly eminent career may be promoted to Professor without being the head
of their department.  Either way, you're not likely to be a Professor until you
are in your 50s.

The fact of a functional difference between Prof. and Dr means that the titles
are used, since they carry distinctive features:  Professor => [+ eminent].
But an interesting anecdote is that, in the late 90s, Oxford suddenly promoted
a lot of tutors who were not already Professor, and were not Heads of
Department, to the rank of Professor.  The rumour, which I heard from one
person who was so promoted, is that the reason was that they were losing out on
the worldwide, American-dominated academic stage because many people assumed
that their not putting 'Professor' in front of their names meant that they were
less eminent than Americans who did put Professor in front of their names,
because that was the description of the Americans' job.  In many cases, they
were in fact more eminent;  more senior, anyway.

So my analysis is that there Professor is a rank, whereas here in the States it
is a job-title which carries no information about rank or seniority.  For this
reason, I'm reluctant to call people here 'Professor X', because it seems to me
that their title is in fact 'Dr'; 'professor' is the common noun that is their
job.  Of course, I'm not implying anything about what I think of the people
concerned by that.  The fact is that I never address them by title anyway,
practising the well-known technique of address avoidance which has been
discussed.  But when I referred to a couple of my very eminent tutors here, in
an application letter, as Dr X and Dr Y, they read it and didn't say that it
would be more appropriate to refer to them as 'Dr', though in Britain they
would certainly have had that rank a long time ago.

Damien Hall
University of Pennsylvania