An assistant professor at a research university in the Midwest was fuming after she received an e-mail from a third-year undergraduate student there. The email was a seemingly impatient request for a meeting that same day to discuss the student’s final grade in a course. The student wanted a B instead of a C+.
Many faculty members have dealt with similar requests, some more reasonable than others. But this professor was most frustrated by the fact that said student also took it upon himself to use the professor’s first name in the e-mail.
Of course, some professors purposefully cultivate a kind of informality, but she was not one of them. She found it disrespectful, and her sneaking suspicion was that this student had taken such a liberty specifically because she was young and female and black.
“He would never have imagined addressing one of the senior men in the department that way,” she complained, “not without some specific cue, some signal that it was OK.”
But one thing she didn’t want to do was “go off” on the student about it. She didn’t want to bring it up. She might seem uptight, unsure about her credentialized authority. But she did want to ask him why he assumed her first name was appropriate, especially given the fact that the culture of her department is decidedly and unmistakably more formal than that.
At the end of the day, she just left it alone. They met. She kept it brief. He made a very weak case for changing the grade (having missed several class sessions and assignments, and performing poorly on exams as a consequence). She wasn’t going to change the grade.
He left, palpably dissatisfied. She kicked herself, ashamed about not having the nerve or the energy to directly address his e-mailed appellation. And she was asking me (via phone later that same day) if she should just learn to be more thick-skinned about such things? Or did she have a point worth standing up for?
