The Title of this Post is "Titles," Part One

[The following is revised from part of an oral essay on "names" which I delivered and recorded in 1983.  I imagine this aspect of the subject to still be an ever-shifting dynamic.]

       What do we want to be known as?  Do we want to be known in the classroom as Dr., Professor, Mister, Don?  This has been a longstanding question for academia.   When I first got into higher education as a faculty member, it was just not thought about twice.  I was Professor, and my students were Mister, Miss, or Mrs.

       That all changed in the late 1960s, and students, at least, became first names to most professors, and that change seems to have remained.  What the professor is called has often been reduced to a first-name basis as well, and a number of my younger colleagues prefer to be called by their first name, and this is a fairly common thing:   break through the title barrier, the thing that makes us seem so different from one another and so removed.