This meme tweet is a pretty good summary of much of the weekend:
This is a perennial topic in academia, and as far as I can tell this round was kicked off by Dan Drezner offering a bit of advice last week:
You can click through and read the replies to that if you feel like your opinion of people on academic Twitter has risen too high for some reason.
This has kind of run its course for the moment, but lacking the time and motivation to write anything more substantial this morning, I’ll throw in my take on this. You should, of course, feel free to regard this as absolutely definitive, settling the question once and for all, and never darken my timeline with it again.
I think the issue here is that there isn’t a single bright-line rule about forms of address for students contacting faculty or staff at an academic institution. Instead, there are two questions of situational ethics (imagine that phrase in a very Jon Polito voice):
What do you know about the faculty/staff member? and
What do you want out of this interaction?
If you already know the professor in question, and know their preferred form of address, use it. End of discussion. If they want to be called “Professor Lastname,” do that. If they prefer to be addressed by their first name, do that. If they choose to go by some made-up name that they were given by a fluorescent raccoon during a peyote-induced vision back in the mid-90’s, do that. You can think their choice is silly or obnoxious— feel free to roll your eyes at them behind their back, or mock them for it among your friends— but when you’re actually talking to a person, call them what they want to be called. Refusing to do that isn’t making a bold political statement, it’s just being a dick.
If you don’t already know them, then we move on to the second question, namely what you want out of the interaction. If you’re emailing a faculty or staff member you don’t already know well, and you want them to do you a favor, it’s in your interest to flatter them by using more formal address: “Professor Lastname” for anyone who’s teaching a class you want to get into (“Doctor” is also fine), some form of their title if you’re contacting someone running an office (“Dean Lastname,” or “Director Lastname”), or “Mr./Ms. Lastname” at the very least. Err on the high side— if you’re not sure whether the instructor of your class is full-time faculty, still go with “Professor,” and let them correct you if you’ve overshot.
Using too-formal address is almost always the safest choice— it’s a rare individual who cares enough about informality to actually get mad about being over-titled. Most people find it mildly amusing, and will offer a gentle correction. If you call an instructor who’s not faculty “Professor” and they flip out at you for it, you have learned a valuable lesson, namely that you should try to avoid talking to that person in the future.
If you don’t know the person you’re contacting, and you don’t particularly want anything from them, but are still addressing a faculty or staff member, well, I don’t know how you ended up in that situation, but I guess you can just do whatever you want. I’d probably still err on the more-formal side to start, because I might someday want something from them, but you be you.
As for the question of norms within a given class, I think most of those arguments are, as is ever the manner of academia, badly overthinking things. I do make an effort when in a class or advising context to refer to other faculty as “Prof. Lastname” unless I know that the particular students I’m talking to know the other person and know what they want to be called, but that’s about it. Students are remarkably good at compartmentalizing— we struggle to get them to carry basic rules of grammar from one course to the next— so I doubt very much that any example set in one classroom carries over to the next in a meaningful way.
(A possibly important caveat here is that I’m working at an elite small liberal arts college and close relationships between students and faculty are one of the features that justify our very high sticker price. There’s more of a presumption of informality here than there might be in some other places— I’m not aware of anybody who takes a super hard line on being addressed only as “Professor Lastname” in class.)
As a final note, if for some reason you have objections to formal address, it’s really easy these days to just omit a salutation that would require you to make a decision one way or another. This isn’t a grade-school class on How to Write a Formal Letter where you’re going to be docked points for not having the date properly justified according to the rigid template. You can start an email with just “Hello,” or “Greetings,” without using a name, or just jump right into the subject: “I’m a sophomore in the morning section of your intro class, and was wondering if…” or “I’m writing to ask whether it’s possible to get an extension on the deadline for this application…” It’s maybe a little abrupt, but less irksome than “Hey, Firstname” at the start of a request for a favor.
There you go, problem solved. You can thank me later— formally, please.
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If you’d like to just call me names online, the comments are open.
So, I guess "Dood, I'm a sophomore in your..." is out?
You're right, leaving the salutation off entirely IS abrupt...
Hello Prof. Orzel,
I'm wondering if there was anything specific that inspired "If they choose to go by some made-up name that they were given by a fluorescent raccoon during a peyote-induced vision back in the mid-90’s, do that." because I seem to remember reading something that's worded almost exactly the same way.