Comments on: Professor Who

By: Anne

Anne — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:38:24 +0000

i consider anyone who has a PhD to be a professor. It’s interesting though, the only professor I have who I actually call professor is a temporary adjunct. All the rest of my professors I call Dr. __________ or by their first name.

By: David

David — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:39:19 +0000

I have never worked at any school that really worried much about job titles. At my current college, students, staff, and sometimes faculty regularly refer to our adjuncts as professors. No one makes a big deal about it. It’s a job descriptor, nothing more.

Now, people calling themselves doctors when they do not have PhDs does bother me. That is something I put in years of sweat to earn. I do not make anyone, including my students, call me Dr. Morse, but I do take offense when someone who has not earned it (and it is often an administrator) tries to use that title.

On the other hand, I recall a time when I was a graduate student at USC and I referred to one of my professors as “doctor.” He immediately said, “Professor, not doctor.” I said I had never really thought about the difference. He replied, “Then I’ll explain it to you. Doctor means you finished school. Any idiot can do that. Professor means someone thought you were good enough to hire you.”

So I suppose it is all in how you look at it.

By: Sandra Wise

Sandra Wise — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 01:02:39 +0000

I was laid off at the end of the fall semester, along with the 15 other adjuncts in my department. Budget problems forced them to give us the ax. But when the president of the university sent out a campus-wide email at the beginning of spring semester, he expressed his relief that the money problems weren’t too dire: “We have not had to lay off any faculty or staff.” Apparently the title Adjunct Faculty was just a figure of speech. I was nothing more than a temp.

By: Andrea

Andrea — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:10:32 +0000

I call all my college teachers “professor.” It just seems like a sign of respect. And no — not respect for tenure — but respect for the fact that, since I am the one learning, I know less than the person in front of the class. I feel uneasy calling any teacher by his or her first name. It makes me feel like I’m unfairly asserting a peer-relationship and dishonoring some long established hierarchy of intelligence.