Asking to be called by your proper title is not “stuck up”. It is formal, and a degree of formality is appropriate in professional situations. If you’re not comfortable with people calling you by your title and would prefer that they call you by your first name, that’s great, and kudos to you for reaching out to your students. Personally I’m not comfortable with students or anyone else with whom I’m not friends calling me by my first name. I’m generally not comfortable referring to students by their first names either; we’re not friends, I don’t know them or anything about them at the start of the semester. Why would I presume to be on a first name basis? It just seems rude. Once I get to know them that might change, if they allow it.

My friends and colleagues call me “Will” or “William”. My kids call me “Dad”. My students call me “Dr Behun”.

I’m sure that jj1, given the wealth of experience that he has having studied at university for a whole four years, will think that I’m “incredibly stuck up.” I’m okay with that. I think anyone (student, telemarketer, barista, etc) who demands the right to call me by my first name whether I like it or not is a presumptuous ass.

This is somewhat foreign to me. In both my undergrad and now my grad program, I’ve only had one professor who requested not to be called by their first name. If anything the bigger problem has been acting too formally around professors who expect more casual interactions. Maybe my experience has been anomalous, but I always assumed that this level of formality was the exception rather than the rule.

Junior women and minority professors are required to Always Be Thinking about how to negotiate power relations with students. Those who don’t usually end up having endless problems with classroom management. It has been a big relief, personally, to relax some of that formality after tenure.

As far as professors socializing with grad students outside of departmental activities goes, my advice is: be very careful, especially if you are a junior faculty member. While the power imbalance can end up being “problematic,” at minimum, for the grad student if the relationship turns sexual or otherwise intimate, I think there is also a big risk to the faculty member. The transition from grad student to assistant professor is often vexed, and having lots of casual interactions with the grad students in your program can make the transition even harder. You don’t want your senior colleagues to see you as another grad student, and you don’t want to have to sanction a buddy.

Faculty should aim for avuncular (or its non-gendered equivalent). And by that I mean a kind and compassionate but slightly distant uncle–not a creepy, over affectionate, drinking buddy, boundary-crossing one.

At the beginning of all my courses, I ask my students to address me with “Professor Braun”. I also tell them that I will address them with “Ms. [last name]” or “Mr. [last name],” unless they have objections to this. The vast majority do not object, but a few have asked me to address them with “Mrs. [last name]”, which I have done. I have had no requests for other titles. I also ask the students to address each other in this way during class. Perhaps I am fooling myself, but I think that doing this introduces a note of seriousness and respect for everyone in my classes.

I’ve been blessed with how staff/student interaction has gone in my Master’s and Ph.D. (As an undergraduate I had no interaction with my lecturers.) Variously, I’ve been to house parties with them, they’ve invited small classes around for dinner, they’ve opened their houses for grad students to house-sit when they’ve been away, I’ve gotten drunk (well not very drunk) with them, and there’ve never been any problems, nor have I heard of any.

Perhaps the reasons for this are no more generalisable than that both the senior and junior people in question were responsible and decent. But I can try and discern some trends. Perhaps they are all platitudes.

* People have almost always talked philosophy, even if the philosophy has been more entertaining than whatever paper they’re currently working on – it’s been some exciting idea they’re throwing about, some nice anecdote about some historical philosopher, etc. That distance from personal stuff – relationships and sex obviously, but also fears, passions, essay marks, etc., is maybe good to have when there’re power differentials. Though I remember telling a famous philosopher that he was a damn fool if his philosophy of art denigrated Dylan, and he responded by laughing, slapping his thigh, and shaking my hand. (I am and was at the time a grad student.) This, I think, is the most important point. I have been extremely critical of senior colleagues’ views, and have been so in sharp language, and this has been a way of being close to them; and it is perhaps not quite right to speak of philosophy – which can be deeply part of one’s life – as ‘not personal’ or ‘just shop;’ but discussion never went anywhere near sex lives, and I think that that was in every instance wise. (This coming from one who thinks that every rules has an exception.)
* Don’t get too drunk. It can be good for a senior person to be drunk and so invert power relations somewhat, but it’s of course to leave a lot to fortune.
* Faculty have often just talked amongst themselves about admin stuff and not made too much of an effort to include the present grad students, but have let the grad students listen. I’ve always found this good: one learns about that side of being a professional philosopher, and that’s part of being (seen as) equal to them in due course. It’s also a way of including grad students non-patronisingly.
* Respect is shown in more ways and in more subtle ways than using the correct title. Being sensitive to all of this is important. Though of course, outside the classroom, academic titling is less important, and it’s important for students to learn to grow by treating more senior people as relatively equal, and there has to be some allowance made for students trying that, and for getting it wrong.

I’m puzzled by the idea that we should foster equality by returning to hierarchic Victorian ideas about due respect for rank. Then again, this sort of anti-egalitarian trade-off typical of the zero-sum game of liberal identity politics.

One issue I’ve not seen raised is how gender affects the degree and type of social interactions faculty have with students. When I was a graduate student, there were frequently departmental wide events that involved faculty socializing with all the grad students, but there were also several faculty members who interacted more frequently and intimately with one or two grad students, particularly ones they were advising or working closely with. So far, I see no problem with that. But because most of the faculty were male (and the one female faculty member was often not on campus), faculty seemed to have some uncertainty about inviting women students out for drinks in the same way that they would invite male students. I’ve done just fine, but I have suspected that the male students were benefited by more personal, one-on-one socializing with faculty members. And I don’t even blame the male professors for not inviting me out for one-on-one drinks because, society being the way it is, the invitation could easily be misinterpreted. But how do you handle this potential inequality? Deprive men of the benefits of one-on-one interactions with faculty, since society is such that one-on-one interactions between female students and faculty are more vexed? This doesn’t seem right to me. Perhaps it’s just an unfortunate situation, but I’m curious if anyone has any thoughts on the matter.

Here’s a nearly one-size-fits-all suggestion: whatever your monniker, whatever you do, be the decent, do-no-harm, compassionate, cosmopolitan ADULT in every room you share with students, no matter how old they are, or how old you aren’t.

This means being so good at what you do that you can do great philosophy and manage social presentation and expectations at the same time. (Note that this also means not being so drunk that your judgment is off for the social part of this–and if it is, be aware that the philosophy part’s not as awesome as you or your fellow inebriants think it is.).

Yes you can think about philosophy and social dynamics at the same time–think of all the opportunity you’ve had, by this point in your career, to practice this (ahem). It means paying attention to the knotty problem under discussion *and* to the fact that you, or one of your colleagues, needs to say something now and then to keep the social sense of inclusion going for the handful of students toward the edges of the group, whose hanging back can have many causes, some obvious, some not, it doesn’t matter–having a good discussion in philosophy means, for mentors, being more responsible for fostering the micro-community of the social group. It means you really must stop thinking about yourself as a student who has come out ahead, who has earned pontification rights in bars and restaurants and house parties, and see yourself instead as a younger version of those more senior members of the profession who, you’ve noticed, make a push to keep the group together and avoid concentrating an ever-smaller circle of devotées. These are the genrous people, who may be slightly unsatisfying because they don’t mini-promote and micro-hierarchicalize and feed the needy little narcissisms of students, but whose social equanimity and outreach make them, and the people around them, better philosophers.

So be the young Professor So-and-so, or Dr. Initial, or Firstname–it’s up to you!–whose eminence, or native social skills, liberates him or her from needing to build up and tear down people, rather than arguments. Be the 27 year old grown up in a roomfull of 25 year olds–and be sure you’re even better at it when you’re 40 and well past pretending that your identification with students makes these difficult social grooming questions.

And if you’re a member of a smaller (or microscopic) demographic group in philosophy, remember that you can keep insisting, calmly and locally and with dignity, that the people around you, students and colleagues, treat you properly–it may take them a while to hear you, but keep at it–they’ll catch up at some point.

I’m with Nick Munn and Suzy Kilminister on this (perhaps it is no coincidence that Nick is a former student of mine!) . It is common in New Zealand and Australia for undergraduates (and not just graduate students) to address the lecturers and professors by their first names and I have never had a problem with it, though perhaps it is important that I not a woman, young-looking or otherwise. (It has just occurred to me that, I am a bit more inclined to *refer* to my female colleagues than my male colleagues by their titles when I am talking to undergraduates, perhaps because, without really thinking about it, I want students to recognize their intellectual authority and expertise, something that is perhaps a bit less likely with a woman than a man.) But I would like to protest against the absurd suggestion that teachers who routinely allow their students to address them by their first names do so because they are so secure of their place in a hierarchical society that they can afford a certain faux informality.

Here’s Professor Plum:
‘Arguably social hierarchies are more entrenched in the UK than in the US, so perhaps [UK habits of informality] should be understood as a kind of noblesse oblige of a group of people very secure in their higher social status’.

And here’s Mr T:
‘If you go by your first name,…should also recognize that it as a matter of privilege as well. Your students probably already recognize that your position is special, so you don’t need a title to communicate why it is so. The power differential between you and your students is clear in everyone’s mind, and by going by your first name you can pretend that you are immune to such social differences while at the same time you continue to benefit from them.’

The first claim is a sheer mistake and the second claim likewise, at least if it is intended as a critique of European or Australasian informality. Rest assured, Madam and Sir, that if you want an academic culture characterized by hierarchy and deference, it is NOT the UK, Europe generally or Australasia – it is the USA. How do I know this, never having been there? Because my graduate students who have visited to the US , have come back SHOCKED by the atmosphere of formality and subservience that prevails in many departments, and in particular the way that graduate students were actually nervous of meeting some of their professors in the corridor. (I should add that virtually all the American academics that I have known are modest and unassuming and not given to standing on ceremony, but then all the Americans I have known have been either dyed-in-the wool ex-pats or people accustomed to spending long periods abroad.) Please understand that the abject contortions caricatured at the outset of this thread are utterly alien to my experience as an undergraduate at Cambridge, as a graduate student at la Trobe in Australia and as a teacher at Massey and Otago, for the last thirty years. When I was a doing my PhD at La Trobe in eighties, it would never have occurred to me to get into such ridiculous tizz about addressing the lecturers or professors by their first names. They were all routinely ‘John’ or ‘Robert’ ‘Janna or ‘Brian’ to me (an astonishingly large proportion of the staff at La Trobe were in fact called either ‘John’ or Robert’). It may be that in a highly deferential culture, an ostentatious preference for being on first-name terms betokens a covert enjoyment of privilege, but strange as it may seem there are many cultures a lot less deferential than that of North America.

Now, if you are a denizen of a hierarchical society, NOT getting treated with the deference due to your status is tantamount to an insult, so there is an issue here for women and non-white instructors and professors who don’t get the respect that they would otherwise be entitled to. Hence I do not condemn them for insisting on a certain formality. But may I suggest an analogy from a recent episode of Downton Abbey? Tom, a former chauffeur who has married into a great house is attending a house party at another mansion. He is now, as the son-in-law of an earl, a little grudgingly, accepted as part of the ‘Upstairs’ world. But the butler, finding out that he is former servant, ostentatiously refuses to pour him a coffee or to fill his wine-glass. This is, of course, a calculated insult, and it is done in defense of a hierarchical society since the butler disapproves of social mobility. It was wrong of the butler not to pour Tom his coffee. This does not mean that there isn’t something amiss with a society in which some people are privileged to have their coffee poured by others, whilst those others have to stand around catering to their everyday requirements. In a society with servants it is of course better if ex-servants are not insulted and belittled once they have made it out of the servant-class But a servantless society is on the whole to be preferred.