Sphinx

Partly because I am a basically shy, socially insecure and rather unspontaneous person, I remember having tremendous problems as a young postgraduate student in navigating the transition from regarding academics with awe and addressing them with reverence to, well, still regarding them with awe and reverence but being treated by them in a more informal, egalitarian manner. In particular, I recall the very gradual development of letters between me and my supervisor, with his signature moving from “Peter G” to “Peter” to “P”, and me trying to come up with ways to avoid having to address him as anything for fear of arousing divine wrath through my presumption.

This reflection has been prompted by following an interesting discussion on the Twitter this morning – partly because the computer has been busy messing about with Microsoft Office and refusing to let me do any proper work – set off by @FionaEWhelan asking about female academics experiencing men “forgetting” to use their academic titles, even when they’ve been mentioned in the course of the introduction and even in conference sessions where male contributors do get their titles used. @Katherine_McDon mentioned the fact that students could sometimes go too formal and/or over-compensate with inflated titles, and – I hope without derailing – I wondered about how far this was linked to general student unfamiliarity with written etiquette as well as (clearly) being gendered.

Certainly I find myself more and more often having to add a postscript in replying to student emails to the effect that these should be treated as reasonably formal communications (so, no “Hi!” or “Hello,”, but a proper salutation), and that I’m happy to be addressed by my first name but not just “Dear sir” – and robbing people of their hard-earned academic titles is less likely to win friends and influence people. Yes, it’s a kind of overcompensation; not that I’m obsessed with my professorial title and will be offended if a student doesn’t use it, but simply that I would have felt much happier if someone had simply told me how to address academics at different stages of my career, rather than leaving me trying to guess. If I’d received such a postscript in a reply, I’d have felt mortified for a couple of days, and then much more confident thereafter.

Clearly it’s a generational thing; someone of my vintage still thinks of emails like letters (hell, I tend to write “Dear X” in Facebook messages and Twitter DMs…), and was trained in how to write proper letters back in school, whereas I wouldn’t be wholly surprised if these emailed requests for advice, support or coursework extensions turned out to be the first time some students have ever had to write a formal letter – or, that they simply don’t think of email as a formal medium. I’ll grant also that writing to academic staff may be a discomfiting intermediate category, between formal letter e.g. to prospective employer and informal communication  – so, “Dear sir” appears the sensible option, especially for anyone who’s been used to addressing teachers as “sir”, and so it’s probably a nasty shock when I make it clear that I hate it…

But the interesting question is how far this phenomenon is driven not only by changing modes of communication but also by gendered attitudes: are female academics, and especially younger ones, substantially more likely to be addressed informally, not properly addressed at all or robbed of their academic titles? It was suggested that Katherine and I ought to compare the emails that we receive from students over a set period – and obviously this should be at the start of a new academic year, when an entire new cohort arrives that won’t yet have been subjected to my nagging etiquette postscripts. Further, @EllieMackin suggested, we need a young male and an older female academic, and someone non-binary; perhaps also fixed-term as well as permanent staff; and of course such a survey could (and probably should) be broadened out to include any academic who wants to send in a return, to increase the size of the database.

So, all I need to do now is generate a simple questionnaire – and not forget about this completely, so that in mid-September it can be publicised and everyone can start collecting data…