There's a new article in the ABA Journal called "Should Students Call Law Professors By Their First Names?" At the start of every school year, I wonder about this issue.
Generally, most people at the law school, from my colleagues to my students, call me "Alex." When I first started working in ASP, that's what I thought I should be called. I thought it made me more approachable and would make students more likely to accept or seek out my help. Also, it's how I think of myself, and when I was in college, I thought it was really cool that one of my professors went by "Mr." when he could have been "Professor" or "Doctor." To me, the gesture was egalitarian and punk rock, and it actually made me more receptive to what he had to say.
However, from time to time, one of my colleagues says I shouldn't go by "Alex" and that I'm being too low key and casual. As far as I know, my choice to be "Alex" hasn't led to destructive over-familiarity or lack of respect to myself or anyone else. I could see how it might, but every time I think about being more formal, I get an image of Dr. Evil complaining that he "didn't spend six years in evil medical school to be called 'mister,' thank you," which kind of derails the entire thing.
There's every possibility I'm wrong in the way I'm thinking about this name thing and whether "Alex" is more comfortable and effective than "Professor" or "Mister" of "Director." Although I said they could, a lot of students don't use my first name, and I couldn't say I was necessarily comfortable with using first names as a student. When I was graduating college, my favorite professor told me that I could call him "Kirk" now that I was a graduate. I couldn't get used to it, so I joked around that I would call him "Snake" (during a hike, we had decided that would be his biker name, if he was a biker). Twenty-something years later, I still call him "Snake." As far as I remember, I called only one law professor by his first name, and that was because we spent a lot of time working on a symposium together, and that's what he asked to be called. For my masters degrees, I called fiction writers and poets by their first names, but that was standard with everyone.
I'm sure I'll wonder about this next year. So far, I've never decided to change. Part of it is that I believe ASP serves a different purpose and has different strengths and weaknesses than your average law class, but part of it is that I think I'd ultimately be less useful to struggling students if I put in place some sort of formality I didn't feel comfortable with. In the immortal words of Popeye, "I yam what I yam," and possibly this is a good enough reason to go by "Alex" as any. (Alex Ruskell)
