(Ms)Titled, Or How I Can’t Stop Worrying at How I’m Being Referenced

Academia is one of those strange social spaces where titles are important.  How you define yourself often takes a back-burner to how others want to define you. This is exacerbated by the engrained belief that where you teach necessarily defines who you  are as a person and a scholar, regardless of your education and background. I had a good laugh yesterday when my best friend stated: “I’ve never met anyone who uses titles in mail like you do.” It’s true when I send mail (real tactile mail, you know through the post office) I always include titles whatever they may be:  Dr. So and So, Ms. Such and Such, Professor La Di Da, etc. My explanation for this is two-fold: 1. My father used to work for the post office so how to address a letter was pretty much the second thing I learned after my own name and 2. Titles sadly are about respect and if someone has earned that title of Dr or Professor why not use it? How many times have you seen that conversation on Twitter about whether you should book your flight using Dr. instead of Ms. or Mr. and if one wants to be responsible for a medical emergency on a plane. It is important to note that I am always very aware of how people would like to be addressed and I only use titles that they themselves have used previously.  Titles bring about very complex class and gender issues to be sure, issues that academics should be engaging with. So what happens when we mistitle our own?

I have a colleague whom I work with on a regular basis who is a professor at a local university. She has her doctorate and I always make sure to call her Dr or Professor when speaking of her to potential students or others. She on the other hand insists on calling me Ms. both in correspondence and when speaking to potential students. I have my doctorate, so why am I Ms. and she gets to be Dr.? When I am teaching I do not get stuck up on titles, students don’t have to call me Dr so and so, or Professor etc.  If they want to call me by my first name I am okay with this (again I have blogged about this previously here). I do this because it is so very important for me to create an open comfortable space in my classes, and if titles get in the way of doing this then I would much rather they discard them.  My situation with my colleague is different however. We call each other by our first names of course when we meet, but it’s the disconnect between how she refers to me and how I refer to her that is troubling.

I have politely corrected her on many occasions; my email signature even has the Dr on it, yet nothing.  The only explanation I can discover to this has to go back to how where you teach somehow dictates the assumptions one has about you as a scholar. In the past there were little to no doctoral graduates who taught at the collegiate level in Canada. Over the past ten years that number has grown to where you are just as likely to find a Dr So and So at a college as you are at a university. Yet, old habits die hard. Like the tendency to still call colleges “community colleges” (a connotative term which I have blogged about previously that somehow suggests a lesser value education). To me being called Ms. when I have the same academic credentials as that other person is disrespectful not only to my hard -earned doctorate but also to the college I work for.  I am sure I am not the only one who has encountered this in their workplace, at conferences, in correspondence.  What do you do if you’ve been Ms(titled)? Do titles matter to you in your pedagogical practice?