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do people in the US call every teaching academic a professor or does this person just not think about junior academics https://twitter.com/ProfessorCrunk/status/1349012729936412676
having been an academic I truly cannot stand this sort of nonsense sorry! cancel me
by all means insist on being addressed however you want by people who you don't have power over, but this "students have no respect" enforcement of obscure, arbitrary, and invisible norms is a form of brain worms
my point is not that informal forms of address are better! it is that students are almost certainly really nervous about contacting you and trying their best to be polite but not weird, can you please just chill for five seconds and quit projecting
It really is not about formality or informality, or not completely. I have a fairly strong preference for being addressed with my first name, but if a student is clearly uncomfortable with it I don’t push it, and I don’t make snide posts about how weird and dumb they are!
i do NOT miss academic status jockeying... it is such a poor substitute for making real money. of course I still don’t make real money but on the other hand I don’t have to work with academics
anyway apparently the standard is to address TA/tutors by their first name! so this is also about enforcing hierarchy in the workplace
The Express and Telegraph (Adelaide), 16 Mar 1907: "yeah business letters are confusing... it's really weird to open with 'dear' though, don't do it"
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/208905163
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/208905163
Newcastle Mining Herald And Miners' Advocate Wed 15 Nov 1882: "Business letter etiquette: get to the fucking point, make sure you have a stamp on." no mention of correct salutation, they don't seem to give a shit
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/141016384
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/141016384
I have been looking over old letter writing guides, and "Dear X," was initially a salutation strictly for personal letters! It seems to have only become broadly acceptable in professional/business letters post-WWI https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/1349143247722065921
bring back the third person passive aggressive complaint letter lmao
