AMERICA—Young people across the country got warm and fuzzy on Friday when Professor Barack Obama signed a class-wide email “Barack.” With the email, students now have unofficial but presumptive license to address Professor Obama by his first name.
“‘Best, Barack.’ I love this guy,” said Vinay Balakrishna, a fifth-year senior at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. “What’s next—‘ttyl, Barack’? Or maybe even ‘Peace, Rocky’? If he keeps this up, me and him could become pretty tight.”
“For the longest time, I felt like Barack and I were on different levels,” added 19-year old Ohioan Christine Robertson. “With this gesture of geniality, our relationship is less hierarchical.”
Professor Obama says that he plans to sign all future emails with his first name—an unprecedented embrace of the horizontality of the knowledge economy and, more broadly, modern social norms.
“In previous years, professors would sign with their full name, ‘Dr. so-and-so,’ or their initials,” said London Goldstein, a researcher with the Maryland Citizens Action Group. “Obama’s email could change the way that young people relate to their superiors and see themselves in the world.”
Some say that Professor Obama abused his authority by exuding friendliness in an email whose express purpose was to request $5 donations. Ethicists at Harvard and Princeton have argued, respectively, that the move “muddies the boundaries between money and human relationships” and “promotes a certain anarchy in which youth empowerment is an object of market exchange.”
Others were confused that they got the same email at multiple addresses. “Didn’t he know that he sent it the first time?” pondered Collin Broxton, who uses both tombraider4life7890@yahoo.com and collin.broxton@riverside.edu.
Still others were shocked when they clicked the drop-down arrow in their Gmail servers to find that Professor Obama’s message was sent from democraticparty@democrats.org. “Professor Obama did this so that he could get by easier with being a hard-ass,” said a recent graduate of SUNY-New Paltz who is swimming in nearly $50,000 in debt and asked to remain anonymous. “Why else would he consult other people to write his emails for him?”