This morning, I skimmed through an article that came out back in February in The Los Angeles Times called “Hi, I’m Jill. Jill Biden. But please, call me Dr. Biden.” Basically, it’s about how Joe Biden’s wife, our nation’s “second lady,” has been teaching a couple of classes at Northern Virginia Community College since her husband took office and this makes her the first wife of a vice-president who has held a paying job while her husband is in office. Well, if you call teaching part-time at a community college a “paying job.”
Anyway, this was the paragraph that struck me:
In 2007, at 55, Jill Biden did earn a doctorate — in education, from the University of Delaware. Since then, in campaign news releases and now in White House announcements, she is “Dr. Jill Biden.” This strikes some people as perfectly appropriate and others as slightly pompous, a quality often ascribed to her voluble husband.
Slightly pompous? I don’t know, but I guess this falls into the “perfectly appropriate” to me.
Generally, I’m okay with students (and everyone else) calling me “Mr. Krause” or “Steve,” as long as they don’t call me “hey you.” But I have to say that if people aren’t going to call me Steve, especially while on the job, I prefer “Dr. Krause” or “Professor Krause.”
Anybody else out there have a title preference?
All my profs get “Dr.” (or “Prof.”) and their last name, except one who gets “Dr.” and his first name.
To me, I always felt it was appropriate to refer to a professor like you would your teachers in K-12.
As far as Dr. Biden goes, she’s got every right. I had been contemplating a PhD up until this year, when I found getting another Master’s would be more up my alley. I know that if and when I pursue the doctorate, I’m going to use the “Dr.” as a title.
How to address your prof seems to be an issue for many students.
I think a lot of Aging Baby Boomers like myself were conditioned to a more formal classroom protocol, where calling the professor by his/her first name seemed overly familiar at best, and downright disrespectful at worst. So when I come back to grad school some thirty years after getting my undergrad degree, it took me a while to feel okay calling my profs by their first names, even tho they referred to themselves that way.
And even now, when current educational practices seem to advocate more informal, student-centered classrooms, I notice my first year community college students get visible uncomfortable, and go through all kinds of contortions to avoid addressing me by my first name, even when I’ve tacitly given them permission to do so. Makes me think that at least some of Dr. Biden’s students might be grateful to her for sparing them this kind of dilemma.
In teaching smaller class sizes I personally prefer to be called by my first name vs. Professor Molloy.
Also, I like most of my colleagues in the art department have the terminal degree of an MFA, not a PhD. When I occasionally get called “Dr. Molloy” I find myself correcting students’ assumptions that all academics are Doctors.
Generally speaking, those with doctorates in subjects that cannot be faked and that have been awarded by universities that exist in the earthly world go by their first names or by the title Professor.
Those who obtained other doctorate degrees and/or who parade themselves around as expert witnesses or as experts in education in the public schools seem to like the pompous title.
If you really are somebody, people will know it without the use of any title.
[The only doctors I know of are physicians, dentists, and veterinarians.]