My attention was drawn to this headline for an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that asked “Do Professors Have a Right to Mistreat Students?” My immediate reaction was “Well, duh! Of course not!” and was wondering why that question should even be asked.
It turns out that the article was prompted by a college professor who had refused to use any gender identification terms other than male and female.
Nicholas Meriwether, who teaches philosophy at Shawnee State University, in Ohio, and routinely addresses students as “Mr.” or “Ms.,” refused to address a transgender woman by the pronouns or honorifc she uses. Meriwether explained that he was not willing “to communicate a university-mandated ideological message regarding gender identity” that conflicted with his Christian beliefs. When he sued the university for violating his rights to free speech and equal protection, a district court found that the student “dreaded participating in plaintiff’s class but felt compelled to do so because plaintiff graded students on participation.” The college had tried to accommodate Meriwether by proposing that he refer to all students by first or last names only, without using gendered titles for any of them. That would have treated everyone equally, and it would not have required him to say anything he did not believe.
Meriwether refused, declaring that titles “foster an atmosphere of seriousness and mutual respect that is befitting the college classroom.” Instead, he proposed using the last name, without a gendered honorific, for the transgender student only. Of course, “seriousness and mutual respect” would have then been unavailable to her, and her alone. She would be conspicuously singled out, treated worse than all other students.
…Racism and sexism are also matters of public concern, and they have sometimes had religious justifications. Suppose a teacher thought it appropriate to address only the Black students by their first names, a demeaning treatment that was once common, to signify their subordinated status.
Notice that he had refused a compromise of calling all students by just their first or last names because doing so would not “foster an atmosphere of seriousness and mutual respect that is befitting the college classroom” but he was willing to call just that one student by their last name, implying that they did not reserve that respect. Meriwether clearly felt that his pious Christian disapproval of gender fluidity justified singling out that one student. Teachers know (or should know) that students generally dislike being singled out for whatever reason.
Meriwether’s attitude is utter rubbish. Respect is not just determined by the way one is referred to but also by the tone and attitude underlying it. When I was director of my university’s teaching center, I would tell those faculty who were discomfited by the casual forms of address adopted by some students, thinking that they were not being respected, that it is perfectly possible for a student to respectfully call you by your first name while calling you “Professor X” in a voice dripping with contempt.
When I started teaching in the US decades four decades ago, I struggled with the question of names. I like the classroom atmosphere to be informal and so wanted to call my students by their first names. But I was aware that the power differential between teacher and student would mean that many students would hesitate to call me by my first name, and this would reinforce the sense of inequality. I did try one semester to call all of them Mr. and Ms. but that seemed so artificial to me. (This was long before discussion of transgender issues became commonplace.)
The solution I hit upon was, before the semester began, to send out a letter to all students telling them that they could call me Mano, Mr..Singham, Dr. Singham, or professor Singham, whichever they felt comfortable using, and asked them to tell me how they would like me to address them. It worked fine. There was never any issue with respect or the lack of it, because that arrangement was mutually agreed upon. Meriwether thinks he is being respectful by using Mr. and Ms. but in fact he is imposing his approach on everyone, irrespective of their feelings, and unilaterally deciding when and with whom to make exceptions.
College faculty should not forget that almost all their students are over 18 years of age and thus adults who can drive, get married, get drafted to fight in wars, vote, and do pretty much anything we can do except buy alcohol and tobacco until they are 21. We should not infantilize them by ignoring their legitimate needs and concerns. And respecting their gender identity is about as legitimate a concern as it gets.
In a biography of anthropologist Margaret Mead (Margaret Mead: Coming of Age in America (1999)), Joan Mark writes about Mead’s work in 1931 among the Arapesh community in a very remote interior region of mountainous New Guinea.
Among the Arapesh, the personality and roles of men and women were similar. The people were quiet and unassertive. Both sexes nurtured and cherished their children. The most complicated part of the culture was the language, which had 11 genders or grammatical categories (English has three – male, female ,and neuter), 22 third person-pronouns, and many ways of making plurals. (p. 50)
These religious bigots are freaking about using gender neutral honorifics and pronouns. Their brains would explode at having to deal with 11 genders and 22 third-person pronouns.
One of my two high schools encouraged us to address all teachers and even the principal with first names, the other insisted on the usual ‘title’ ‘surname’ mode of address. Thus I can say with some confidence: encouraging a first name rapport with students goes a long way towards eroding that sense of inequality, and noticeably benefits classroom communication.
routinely addresses students as “Mr.” or “Ms.,” refused to address a transgender woman by the pronouns or honorifc she uses. Meriwether explained that he was not willing “to communicate a university-mandated ideological message regarding gender identity” that conflicted with his Christian beliefs.
As the kind of xtian* that I suspect Mr. Meriwether is it seems that he had already made an accommodation by referring to his female students as “Ms.”, given that he probably believes women to be subservient to men and should be addressed with an honorific that indicates their relationship to the male that “owns” them.
* see what I did here, I refused to address Mr. Meriwether using a label he prefers.
I remember how much I hated getting letters addressed to Mr. when the writer knew I was not a mister. I am working hard at making my language gender neutral. I also remember being given the choice of Miss or Mrs because “Ms is not in the dictionary (it was -- I looked it up after that interaction was over). Most women in my profession do not change their name upon marriage so are technically not a Mrs and definitely not a Miss. The only classmates I lost touch with were the ones who changed their names upon marriage.
I volunteer with an organization where we ask people what they want to be called. One person joked that they wanted to be called King … I told them that if that’s what they wanted to be called put it on their name tag and that is what I would call them.
Mary Brooks @#3,
There will often be jokesters like the person who wanted to be called King. Although I never had a student try that gag with me, like you, I would have honored the request with all seriousness. My feeling is that pretty soon they would start to feel silly and the joke would be on them.
Mary Brooks @3:
As you say, there are some fields where the woman taking her husband’s name normally doesn’t happen, and for good reasons. The immediate one I think about is acting: the Screen Actor’s Guild in the U.S. has some pretty strict ‘branding’ rules, where every member has to have a unique name, and getting your name changed on the register is a lot of work, so most women who had acting roles before getting married don’t change their professional name after getting married.
And people like this professor always seem to want to treat it as a free speech issue. Of course, from the university’s perspective, it’s a free association issue… sure, the professor can say whatever he wants, but there’s no reason the university needs to keep hiring him or sending students to his classes if he’s an asshole making it more difficult for some students to actually learn.
It is a free association issue. The prof is free to associate with whomever he wants and call them whatever he wants… in his private life. When he gets to work, he can fucking knuckle down and do his job like everyone else, or get a job at some sky-pixie-friendly “university” that doesn’t have the status he’s seeking from the title “professor” at a proper institution. I don’t see the issue here -- simply point to his employment contract, then the door.
Re: respect and titles -- most of the teachers at my school had Bachelors degrees in their subject or something close to it (head of Maths had an engineering degree). One of the physics teachers had TWO, but couldn’t teach a fish to swim. She had a hard time. All of these teachers were referred to as “Mr. Galloway”, “Mrs. Webster”, “Miss Gallagher” and so on, and addressed as “sir” or “miss”(this even to the married ones) appropriately.
One -- a teacher of geography -- had a PhD. He insisted on being referred to as “Doctor Rummery”. Well, fine, he’d done the work, I guess. Even a 13 year old (especially a 13 year old?) knew, however, that in the context of a state high school in a working class northern town, this marked him out as a massively pretentious ponce. Oh we called him “Doctor Rummery”, alright… but you could very clearly hear (and sometimes see) the quotation marks we were putting round “Doctor”. In five years at the school, not a single other teacher ever, to my knowledge, picked any child up on their massively sarcastic tone of voice when referring to him by his preferred title. They must have all held him in similar esteem, I guess.
…English has three – male, female ,and neuter…
What about plural?
Plurality is not gender, Pierce.
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As for the featured philosophy professor, clearly he’s not very philosophical about the situation.
John Morales @ # 8 -- But plurality is a grammatical category.
As for the featured philosophy professor…
One has to wonder how the poor fellow copes with addressing non-Christian concepts.
Well, Pierce, three genders, two numbers (one, more than one) in English.
Still different things, so not sure why you ask “what about” them.
(Also, three cases: nominative, accusative, and genitive)
Even within Indo-European languages, pronouns can be complex. In Irish (and other members of the Celtic language family), prepositions & pronouns are fused, so my pronouns when speaking Irish are not just sé/é (he/him) but also aige (by him), ann (in him), air (on him), as (out of him), de (from him), dó (to him), faoi (under him), leis (with him), thairis (over him), etc.
Cat Mara, in Western Asian languages (formerly known as Semitic languages) we decline preposition as well. These don’t count as pronouns but as declined forms of the prepositions. Example from Hebrew: ‘to’ is ‘le’. To me: li; to you (singular masculine): l’kha; to you (singular feminine): lakh; to him: lo; to her: lah; to us: lanu; to you (plural masculine): lakhem; to you (plural feminine): lakhen; to them (masculine): lahem; to them (feminine): lahen.
English, in common with Classical Latin, has four genders: masculine [boy], feminine [girl], common [child] and neuter [table]; and seems to be moving towards eliminating the masculine and feminine in favour of just common and neuter, as well as removing the distinction between singular and plural (already all but gone in the second person, barring dialect forms; “I” and “we” are used more or less interchangeably in writing at least; and “they” is becoming more widely accepted as a universal third person pronoun in the common gender, while “it” remains as third person neuter singular).
French eliminated the neuter gender by arbitrarily (we can see just how arbitrary by comparing and contrasting with other languages derived from Latin …..) assigning masculinity or femininity to inanimate objects, but still retains vestiges of the common gender; for instance, possessive pronouns indicate gender only on the right side, so “sa soeur” can equally mean “his sister” or “her sister”.
Mr Singham’s essay explains why the current college graduates are so brittle and snow-flaky.
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Mr Singham and his kind contributed -- unfortunately -- to the ill-discipline and ill-education of college students.
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Then I read the comments here which are all vapid, flaccid, pointless discussions about languages and its pronouns and genders. Singham and commentators play the role of wise sages in the tale “the emperor’s new clothes”.
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Mr Singham and universities have failed to vaccinate the poor dear students against the vicissitudes of Life. The benighted snowflakes need the Benny Hill treatment. “I have never been so insulted in my life!!!” Benny Hill: “you need to go out more often!!!”. As beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, insult lies in the ears of the beholder.
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Gone are the days of “Sticks and stones may break my bones. But words shall never hurt me.”
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Gone are the days of resiliency, sagacity, and serenity.
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Dynamics are reversed. Before, students pursue entry to university for education. Now, university pursues students for revenue. Before, university sets the rules. Now, students set the rules.
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Snowflakes are very rare at Trade Schools (plumbing, electric, carpentry, etc..). And Trade Schools aim at graduating competents, not fragile, brittle, sensitive snowflakes.
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Serious university students who are working “hardcore” (using Elon Musk parlance) are not complaining about mis-gendering, mis-pronouns or other woke insanity.
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Students need to ask what is most important: useful education or being addressed by the proper pronoun?
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The fuss being made by woke students and woke faculty betrays a fundamental pettiness. This pettiness reminds me of the temper tantrum of Ms Barbara Boxer when she was addressed as “ma’am” by Brigadier General Michael Walsh in 2009. She worked very hard to be elected Senator, dammit!!! Mr Singham does not show this pettiness for himself but he is guilty in allowing this pettiness in his students. The proper faculty-student relationship seems to escape many contemporary faculty and administration.
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The Chronicle of Higher Education article “Do Professors Have a Right to Mistreat Students?” reflects an intellectual bankruptcy. It is very difficult to write innovative, instructive, illuminating articles time after time after time. An occasional dud is inevitable. This article is a dud. Mistreatment? As beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, mistreatment lies in the eye of the beholder.
friedfishe:
No, it doesn’t, because they aren’t.
(People like you are the snowflakes, who can’t adapt to change or even cope)