They Call Me Doctor Berry
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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(1) "But when I introduce myself in the classroom, I’m Dr. Berry. And I insist on being Dr. Berry."
I take issue with insistence on the "doctor" title when applied to non-medical fields. This reluctance is based on the deluge of worthless doctorates that increasingly occupy my Facebook feed as I age.
While her field of electrical engineering is one for which I have a superstitious dread and respect, since I struggled with elementary calculus and depend on tip calculators at restaurants -- the fact is that it IS really obnoxious to insist on the title when you're not a medical doctor.
I have a juris doctor, making me as much of a doctor as she is. Any lawyer who insisted on the title would be laughed out of the profession, and rightfully so. Frankly, any industry where non-medical doctorates are not routinely ashamed of pretentious titles is probably not a very rigorous or worthwhile field. While electrical engineering is certainly not either of those, she admits that most of her colleagues do not insist on being called doctors. Is it so offensive when her students conform to industry standards of etiquette?
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(2) "Having worked with thousands of students, I know for a fact that for many — though by no means all, or even most — there is already a presumption that I, as a female and African-American, am less qualified than my white male colleagues, or at the very least that I was hired in order to meet a double minority quota. And I get it — anti-affirmative-action ideologues have managed to not only demolish the legitimacy of that policy, but tar the reputation of anyone who might have benefited from it (even if, like me, they did not)."
Unless she did not mark that she was black on her application, yes, she almost certainly did benefit from affirmative action and racial quotas. As did I.
Like her, I competed for seats against a pool of minority candidates with far lower scores than the white or Asian pools. (Asians require ridiculously high scores for competitive opportunities at the same schools.) The simple fact is that we ARE less qualified for our opportunities than our white and Asian counterparts. This doesn't mean we can't outperform the competition, but we definitely got a boost in securing our positions.
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(3) "How do I know? Sometimes it’s just a sense, a feeling I get from people’s tone of voice. But some students will automatically call me Ms., while naturally referring to my male counterparts as Doctor or Professor. I’m not alone: When I meet fellow female engineering professors at conferences, this sort of treatment is always a topic of conversation."
Not that her vague feeling of offense isn't valid or anything, but this doesn't really seem worthy of a New York Times article.
Her most concrete examples are where a student "offered tips on how I could improve [my lecture]," and where others had trouble understanding her. Maybe she's not the most talented of lecturers?
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(4) "So what can I do? I already have to run faster and jump higher just to gain that minimal level of respect that my colleagues are graciously, automatically afforded. But I can also insist that my students interact with me in a professional manner, even if it’s not something they’re accustomed to in other classes."
Again, she almost certainly has not had to run faster or jump higher than her colleagues. The dearth of women (and especially black women) in engineering pits her against a much less competitive pool of candidates to fill minimally acceptable quotas. By her own numbers, there are only 140 black women working as engineering professors "out of some 24,640 across the entire field (not including computer engineering)." It takes serious balls to declare this void the fault of a racist engineering conspiracy rather than the simple failure of black women to compete in rigorous fields.
It's certainly possible that she has outperformed her Asian male counterparts, but I would like to see her list such accomplishments as evidence that she did, indeed, run faster and jump higher.
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(5) "I decided to become an engineering professor 20 years ago while sitting in class and realizing that I had never had a professor who looked like me, acted like me or even seemed interested in me. I was typically one of only two or three female students, and one of only one or two African-American students. I wanted to change the face of engineering by showing that the profession could be cool, interesting, exciting, engaging and, most important, diverse. In that way, insisting that students use my title isn’t just about me — it’s about broadcasting, to any female and black students who might hear it, that I am black, a woman, and an engineer, and that they can be the same."
This is where I lose the thread. It is not an accomplishment to be black. I am not a role model because I am Mexican. If I communicate without clarity, my audience is not racist. If there are relatively few competitive Mexicans in my field, that signals a severe problem with Mexican culture and families -- not with the institutions that hire me, particularly when they go out of their way to promote less-qualified minorities!
It's great that she wants to be a role model. So do I. But aside from insisting on a pretentious title, what accomplishments has she listed that kids might look up to? Literally the only thing we know about her in this article is that her students have trouble following her lectures. Also, she's a black woman. Does that a role model make?
We as minorities should not be judged by radically lowered expectations compared to our peers. Can you imagine an Asian man publishing this article and expecting sympathy?
She's talking about the classroom. Informality between student and teacher in the college classroom is as nauseatingly fake as can be. If her honest acknowledgement of the power relationship between teacher and student errs a little on the side of formality, more power to her.
> I have a juris doctor, making me as much of a doctor as she is. Any lawyer who insisted on the title would be laughed out of the profession, and rightfully so.
It would be more apropos to compare how people outside the profession would feel toward you. Trust me, we'd all hate lawyers exactly as much as we currently do if they insisted on the "Dr." title. The jokes might be a little different...
I would find it a bit weird if a professor in college insisted on being called by a title, correct or not, especially in the US. If you want to be called "Dr." just give a bunch of strong hints (using that title on your syllabus, and in class related communications); the savvy students will pick up quickly and the less savvy students will take leads from the more savvy ones (note: no one will use your first name if they don't know it, and even if they do, they would probably not in a professional context). Asking that the title be used explicitly just smells like insecurity, and wouldn't reflect well. Although when I was in middle school in the deep south, my teachers had to tell me to use "Sir" rather than the "Mister" I was used to (being a yankee), so what do I know.
The exception was in theater classes, and perhaps in a couple of other instances of long acquaintance. It just seems reasonable to default to the safer, more formal option. I believe in some places (Europe?) the preferred title would be "professor" instead of "doctor," and I agree that that is more conceptually reasonable outside of medicine.
> Asking that the title be used explicitly just smells like insecurity, and wouldn't reflect well.
The professor in question is teaching electrical engineering students. If they're anything like the EE students I know, this is almost certainly not the only time during class someone will have to politely but firmly remind these students to color inside societal lines. :)
I am glad computer science is very informal compared to other disciplines, otherwise I would totally lose it at conferences where most everyone holds a PhD (and often a professorship). The use of titles is very rare in our discipline.
That's an interesting perspective. It's not universally true. I'm personally bothered by the fakeness of a "hey, just call me Ed" type of introduction from a professor, someone who has a massive amount of power over my future and who is not my friend, and it's going to create a distance and mistrust until I get to know them. On the other hand, it's never been a big issue either way. It's not hard to adapt to local norms, and the macro issues of education are going to dwarf little things like titles soon enough. (I'm currently a CS student, but I'm a comparatively old one :) )
The relationship between teacher and student is a fundamentally formal relationship of trust with (one hopes) clearly defined responsibilities, authority, and so on. It's fake to pretend that the power differential between teacher and student does not exist. I don't feel like a professor who is overly informal right off the bat is honoring the relationship. (but they are sometimes a lot of fun at parties...)
I've never been uncomfortable with informality with a teacher once genuine friendship develops. That's different.
I view Rose Hulman as one of the hidden gems in our educational system.
The term itself comes from the Latin 'docere' - to teach - and goes back to before the first European universities. The title of Doctor for physicians and surgeons is much more recent, and was actually a status-elevating maneuver. Even today, in the UK and countries that follow that system, a surgeon is called 'Mister' and a physician, who is called 'Doctor', will have an Bachelor of Medicine (MB) degree. The MD in that system is a proper medical research doctorate.
So this notion that an academician isn't a proper or 'real' doctor is quite bizarre and ahistorical, It's also unnecessary to reserve the word to distinguish those in the medical fields, since they already have a number of words that refer exclusively to them, physician, surgeon, etc.
So not only do women and racial minorities often need to "run faster and jump higher" to demonstrate that their credentials are legitimate, but they even need exert additional effort to demonstrate that their complaints are legitimate.
(Speaking of exerting additional effort ... I'm reminded of an essay[1] by Tressie McMillan Cottom that argues that the additional effort that blacks have to expend _simply to convince other people that they're not a threat_ takes a real toll. Cottom describes it as a sort of "constant background processing that stereotyped people must perform.")
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2013/0...
This proves my case rather nicely.
This passage makes me deeply uncomfortable.
It sounds like that student was extremely engaged, hungry for knowledge, verification, and possibly validation. He may also have been trying to make the world a better place. That disappeared through a lens of race, gender, and social role issues.
Something built a wall between her and her students. That's crushingly sad.
Basically, for these students (and probably some faculty members), her role has upset the social order to which they've become accustomed. Someone they would otherwise view as inferior to themselves (a black female) is in a superior position to them. It is uncomfortable for them.
This is probably part of why that one student wants to give her instructions on how to improve--my guess is that it has less to do with the quality of her lectures. Rather, he wants to their roles in the classroom to match his notion of their relative social power--with him in the superior position.
This happens quite a bit with black professionals, as well as members of other ethnic minorities. I do some work in this area and it comes up often in professional environs.