What's in a name?

I'm a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to honorifics.

I remember being in my M.A. program at a small, liberal arts college in Georgia, and it was perfectly acceptable to call the vast majority of professors by their first name. I couldn't bring myself to do it. My thesis advisor possessed a comforting traditionalist streak that made it seem completely appropriate (if not cool... I don't think he wanted to be cool, so that helped) to call him Doctor. But it wasn't just him: they were all "Doctor" or "Professor" to me, partly because they seemed to have--I don't know--earned it.

There was a single exception to this. Dan. Well, I think I called him "Dan" twice, if even that. But he was a compositionist and rhetorical theorist. Later, he would move to the university's Department of Education. There are many things I remember about Dan, all of them wonderful and vital to my education. But I, too, remember being confused about why it was that someone as hardworking, erudite, and professionally developed would be so comfortably carry a first name moniker. He didn't seem to mind, but I wasn't sure if his students (or his literary peers) knew that Dan was kindly allowing them to call him Dan. It was his professional philosophy to be approachable, not some downgraded version of a professional title that comp teachers use.

I think it was because of Dan--because I liked the pedagogy he represented--that I've was always allowed students to call me by whatever title suits them. Typically, they begin more honorifically--Professor or Ms. Burke--but then some of them will move to "Rachael." And in a way, I suppose I am allowing them to define my professional identity, aren't I? I used to get a bit uncomfortable when the title "Professor" was thrust in front of my name. Or when, somehow more impersonally, but more formally, my name was dropped altogether, and I became, simply, "Professor." For the most part, I try to maintain approachability, and wearing that title seemed too aloof. Maybe, though, I've been missing the point. See, done right--with kindness and respect and intellectual ethics--a professor professes...ideas, love, guidance. And I have been thinking lately about why it might be as important to embrace this title as much as I have applied it.

In Response to Reform: Composition and the Professionalization of Teaching, Margaret Marshall discusses the way in which the professionalization of teaching and professorship has been somewhat a muddied concept. Marshall asserts that the composition teacher faces many pitfalls of identity crises when latching onto a firm position in professionalized academia. Among the forces that have made a professional teaching identity so difficult to firmly establish seems to have been the "normalization/feminization" of the professoriate, in general. As women increasingly gained access to education and increasingly became educators at higher rates, the professional status of professorship/teaching declined--it seems women weakened the profession of teaching (at least in terms of social clout) and this was most damning to the teaching of literacy. Marshall writes: "The tensions inherent in women doing work that was in many ways professional (and therefore inappropriate for women) created contradictions that had no easy resolutions, but that often led to teaching being seen as nonprofessional, merely "women's work" (pg. 14). I wish I thought Marshall were wrong, but I don't think she is. And I don't think this confusion of identity has stopped, nor do I think it is limited to my field.

Consider Jodi Kantor's 2013 New York Times article "Harvard Business School Case Study: Gender Equity" in which Kantor reviews the academic/social practices that informed the curricular redesign of Harvard School of Business in an effort to address abysmally gender-biased admissions, hiring, and performance/review practices. This effort to address the norms of professionalization in a beacon school that often defines professional standards, too, "created contradictions that had no easy resolutions" (Marshall, pg. 14) when efforts were made to educate and professionalize toward gender equality. But, "the experiment ... brought unintended consequences and brand new issues" (Kantor, 2013). Maybe it was unexpected in a school of business where the standards of professionalization are presented as more culturally absolute; however, even a casual look beneath the surface reveals the way in which women's professional identity in business has been much less clearly defined (and not just approximal of the patriarchy--more complicated than that, as professional lives of all kinds tend to be.)  I think this article and the issues behind it should remind us that many of the forces that have shaped our department (language/composition) are present elsewhere. Many of us share the same professional concerns and struggles, though we may share a different title, and opening the dialogue across curricula and strata of education/professional tiers might not de-professionalize identities so much as help us refine borders for certain conversational contexts.

I think this is perhaps what it means to wear the identity of "professional" and even more so, "professor"--you bear the values of your avocation's culture, and when those values reflect upheaval or contradiction, you, too, must bear that as part of your identity. In composition studies and in education, we are, as Marshall points out, held responsible for the values of community and how those values are articulated, even if some of those values are unsavory or unclear--ideologies we push to change. Some of us get in the trenches--first name first. Some of us wear the names of our family. Some of us are Professors, Capital "P." Whatever we go with, it should represent respect.

So with that, I think I will leave you with this (the best professional advice I ever received from Dr. Bruce Gentry, Editor of the Flannery O'Connor Review, mentor, advocate, and friend):

"People might try to wipe their feet on your soul, but don't let them."

We're all in this together,

Rachael