Stiff and Obsequious - Williams College Profs Promote Their E-mail Ideals

I saw on Twitter that one of the campuses woke professors, Phoebe Cohen, has signed off on a special document meant to tell students how to send e-mails to their professors. While some of the advice is just common sense, parts of it reflect the anxieties and fears of our left-wing professors. Here is a JPEG of the full document.

As a former Williams College professor, I'm interested in some of the details here. First, they insist that you call all your faculty members "Professor." In the first place this is just silly. No one with any sophistication would capitalize the word professor if they used it in a sentence. We don't even capitalize the word president.

I assume that this is done in place of the more normal "Dr." As far as I can tell, this change is recommended because not all your professors have the doctoral degrees? I would have thought it weird to be called a "professor" in a salutation as if my job is a defining aspect of my identity. Yuk! It also strikes me as terribly old-fashion. It is just the sort of salutation I expect an immature, insecure, female professor might crave as a designation which made up for the fact that she never got married and never had any children. Too bad, identity politics has erased virtually all of the status formerly assigned to real professors who were picked for their excellence instead of the contribution to the diversity circus.

The most weird part of the document is that way each of the faculty contributors/reviewers are repetitiously refereed to as Professor X. This is just extreme silliness.

Based on Twitter comments, it also seems to hurt "Professor" feelings if you signal that you don't have the slightest idea of what they do or why it is extremely important. Moreover, if you refer to your desire to become an attorney, a military officer, or a medical doctor, you again hurt their feeling by even suggesting that their careers are not important or valuable enough to emulate.

The larger issue is that this odd, controlling document is designed to teach students to be subservient and obsequious. We are apparently in a new era where being bold, funny, and outspoken is considered a lower value and an inappropriate approach to life. For me, encouraging students to model their work on the inappropriate e-mail would do more for building their character and promoting their success than the timid e-mail promoted by the responsible faculty members.

There is a truly funny example of an acceptable vs. unacceptable e-mails after the break.