Avoiding spelling mistakes

All Thammasat University students and ajarns are familiar with the word professor. It means a highly ranked teacher at a university. The word professor originates with a Latin term meaning to declare publicly. Since professors are always making declarations in public, this is an appropriate title for them. There is a verb to profess in English, meaning to state that we feel a certain way, even if it is not true. Profess may also mean to declare that we believe in something, such as a religion. If we profess something, then we announce, proclaim, or assert it. Since the word professor is important in English, it is unfortunate that sometimes in Thai English it is spelled wrong as professer. This is particularly confusing since there is a rare word in English, professer, meaning someone who professes something. To remember that the word professor ends with the letters or and not the letters er, we may try to invent a short sentence such as the following:

Professor X or Professor Y or Professor Z.

The presence of the word or between the words should remind us that the word professor ends in or. As a matter of style, when professors have academic degrees, they should be mentioned after their names. Often in Thai English, we see the style:

Professor Dr. X.

This is not correct or standard English. In the United Kingdom and the United States, styles differ according to university campus. At some universities, professors who have earned doctoral degrees prefer to be called Dr. At other campuses, they prefer to be called Professor. At other campuses, they prefer to be called Mr. and Mrs. It is always wrong to call them Professor Dr. Instead we should use the format

Professor X, Ph.D.

To show respect to professors, it is best to address them as they wish to be addressed, even if it is not correct in standard English. But usually in the English-speaking world, we will not see the formulation Professor Dr., since that is only found in Thai English and some other countries where non-native writers of English make this mistake.

Here are some usage examples:

• UK universities hiring ‘superstar’ professors to boost research rankings. British universities are imitating Premier League football clubs by poaching “superstar” talent, rewarding an elite group of professors with higher pay in order to boost their research rankings, according to a study. The research by a trio of economists at the University of Nottingham found the government’s research excellence framework (REF) – which rates departments by academic publications and impact – appears to have skewed pay towards professors with the most prolific output.
• I research how to mitigate the social impact of hydropower dams. My core paper on this topic has been cited three times so far. I read in the promotions guidelines at my university that if I want to be promoted from assistant to associate professor I need to accumulate significant citations. As a result, I have now published a paper in which I reviewed 114 definitions of a current academic buzzword, circular economy, to propose the 115th definition of this term.
• Peabody was the first female professor to be illustrated in a children’s picture book, arriving a full 100 years after the first male professor was drawn in a story for young readers in 1850. But she is one of a select few. Only 29 out of 328 academics illustrated in children’s storybooks published up until 2014 are female, according to a new book. This means, says Melissa Terras, professor of digital cultural heritage at Edinburgh University, that “there are hardly any women with expertise being shown to children”. Terras’s new book, Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature, is the result of a research project she began after noticing the stories she read nightly to her two sons rarely depicted clever women. To make matters worse, when she was made a professor in 2013 her then five-year-old son said: “You can’t be a professor, you don’t have a lab coat and you aren’t a man.” Children’s picture books have a long tradition of male professors: mad, sometimes evil scientists (Dr Frankenstinker in Mungo and the Spiders from Space), learned father figures (Uncle Quentin in the Famous Five) or absent-minded geniuses (Professor Branestawm in a series of storybooks). While 25% of professors and 45% of academic staff at UK universities are female, only 9% of picture book academics are women, says Terras.
• Hundreds of UK academics have been accused of bullying students and colleagues in the past five years, prompting concerns that a culture of harassment and intimidation is thriving in Britain’s leading universities. A Guardian investigation found nearly 300 academics, including senior professors and laboratory directors, were accused of bullying students and colleagues. Dozens of current and former academics spoke of aggressive behaviour, extreme pressure to deliver results, career sabotage and HR managers appearing more concerned about avoiding negative publicity than protecting staff.
• UK universities making slow progress on equality, data shows. There were 25 black women and 90 black men among 19,000 professors in 2016-17. Statistics collated by Advance HE, formerly known as the Equality Challenge Unit charity, show that last year only a small fraction of professors in UK universities were from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds, with women especially poorly represented. In the 2016-17 academic year just 25 black women were recorded as working as professors, out of about 19,000 professors in total. More than 14,000 white men were recorded as professors, while just 90 black men held positions of the same status.
• The path to professorship is long, rocky and confusing. Why? During my first academic position, I wanted to become one of these fortunate few. So I visited the university’s HR advisor and asked her – naively – what I would have to do to eventually be appointed professor. Her answer was frank: “I have no idea.” My group leader, a professor, couldn’t help either and told me that “there is no clearly defined path that will get you there.”
• UK’s science reputation ‘at risk if academic visa issues not resolved.’ Dr Mohamed Alnor, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Sudan International University, was denied entry to the UK to attend the World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics, which ended in Glasgow last Monday, despite spending more than $2,500 (£1,890) in fees. Chenxing Liu, a Chinese professor of neuropsychiatry based at the University of Melbourne, Australia, was unable to deliver a planned presentation on evolution and schizophrenia at the four-day event because he could not get a visa in time.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)