Maggie's Farm

Times apparently change. At the unnamed private college I went to many years ago, a quite traditional place, all of the professors and instructors were uniformly addressed as "Mr.," "Mrs." or "Miss" depending on their marital status. Most, but not all, had a Ph.D. degree. Anyway, we were given to understand that the only "Doctors" were medical doctors (dentists included) and those having a Doctorate of Divinity (D.D., which often is an honorary degree) and it was inappropriate to address a Ph.D. as "Doctor." The only person I remember who got addressed as "Dr.______" was the College Chaplain, an older silver-haired gentleman who had an M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School as well as an honorary D.D. As an alternative, you could properly address a faculty member as "Professor" if you knew he or she was one. Anyway, I believe that once was the convention at American universities and colleges.

As students, we were also always addressed as "Mr." or "Miss," although "Ms." was starting to creep in.

I didn't hear the title "Dr. _______" being applied to academics until I later went to a large public university for graduate school--initially it struck me as being rather pompous with all these "Doctors" walking around. Now it seems that all institutions pretty much do that.

[Footnote: I did a little Googling and found the Wall Street Journal apparently still gives university professors the title "Mr." in their articles, at least I found several articles doing that.]

If you want to start another fire-storm, ask whether it is a "B.A." or an "A.B." Traditionally, almost all institutions awarded the "B.A." except for Harvard which always called it an "A.B." Over the past few years, a number of other institutions have put on pretensions of awarding an "A.B."--I've met a number of Stanford types who say they have an "A.B.," so at some point it changed its naming convention.