Bret Devereaux

can you restate the question?

Yes. Too much wine, not going to lie. Why do instructors/professors insist on students calling them "Dr. BLANK" and others maybe prefer "Insert first name here" even when they are the same status? I'm talking about in an undergrad context. Thanks in advance!

Too much wine, or not enough wine? For my part, with (undergraduate) students I prefer Dr. <Lastname>. I think preferences here often come down to attitudes about hierarchy and status distinction.

Some instructors prefer to try to flatten the relationship by avoiding titles which put emphasis on the difference. And certainly, were I teaching graduate students (ah, happy dreams) I'd see the sense in that. Graduate students are junior colleagues.

But I find in undergraduate teaching (and also with the general public on matters where my degree pertains) the distinction that 'Dr.' provides is valuable. After all, the entire reason I am the teacher and they are the students is that I am the Dr. and they are not.

And I don't see a good reason, myself, to 'play pretend' that we are 'all learning together' when that isn't really what we are generally doing. Honestly, the illusion of a non-hierarchical class can hardly survive the first exam anyway.

I'm also aware that the whole bit about titles is different for balding white men (read: me) than everyone else. It is *easy* for white male instructors to dispense with titles, because society accords us respect anyway.

And so in some ways I think that the folks who drop Dr. - in my own experience, almost universally white male instructors - are unintentionally (to be clear, I think they have good motives) benefiting from a privilege their non-white or non-male colleagues do not have.