When I started teaching, I was long haired and young looking. When I concluded my first lecture and asked if there were any questions, one student asked, “How old are you?”

“Thirty.”

“OK.”

That was in 1973, San Francisco State, “the people’s college,” my alma mater. 

“Call me Don,” I told the students. 

I wasn’t yet “Dr. Don.” I wasn’t “Dr.” anything. I wouldn’t get my PhD for five more years.

When I did get it, I also got my job at College of Notre Dame (later renamed Notre Dame de Namur University). I was thirty-five and was still most comfortable being called Don, as I had been at SFSU. But not all of the students shared that feeling. International students, Chinese and Middle Eastern in particular, seemed to think it was disrespectful to call a professor by his first name. But saying “Dr. Stannard-Friel” did not come easy to new, young arrivals from China. “Dr. Don” did. That spread to the other International students. For a while, that was the only “Dr. Don” crowd. Then my son, Matt, enrolled at the college. He called me “Dad,” and so did a lot of his friends.

I’m not sure how that ended. A friend of his told me that Matt told them they couldn’t call me Dad, anymore, so they picked up the “Dr. Don.” Pretty soon, everyone did: other students, faculty members, staff, administrators, even the college president and members of the Governance Board. When I began bringing students to the Tenderloin, service providers called me what they heard my students call me, and so did the kids who were in their programs. So did street people, the drug dealers and homeless who became our street teachers. 

When I retired, and moved to Davis, I became just “Don,” again, except on rare visits to the university or the Tenderloin or occasional coffee dates with former students. But on one visit to Farmer’s Market in Central Park in Davis, I heard a voice call, “Hey, Dr. Don.”

“What?!”

“Dr. Don. Over here.”

It was Sam Soun, one of my Tenderloin students, a Cambodian born in a refugee camp in Thailand. His parents had fled the horrors of the Khmer Rouge genocide, leaving the bodies of three of their daughters behind, dead from starvation or illnesses brought on by the brutal regime. The family was resettled in the Tenderloin, where the dad, whose entire family was murdered by those who caused the deaths of his daughters, succumbed to alcoholism, and beat his wife and boys, until the sons grew big enough to stop him. 

I met Sam, his brothers Sammy and Tee, and sister Laura, when they were all in their early teens. They would all drop out of school, go through periods of homelessness, get in trouble, and deal with their mom’s death when Sam, the oldest, was only twenty-years-old (the dad was long gone from the home). But by then, the community had embraced them. In many ways, The TL is like a village. The siblings were taken in (except for Tee. He was in prison for murder). Sam enrolled in all four classes that I taught in The TL. Sixteen credit hours. He took additional units at City College, and transferred to University of Oregon, where his girlfriend was getting her PhD in psychology (there’s a sweet story behind their meeting). When she finished her doctorate and he his bachelors in sociology, they moved to Sacramento, twenty miles east of Davis. He’s teaching adults and she is a therapist at UC Davis. On the day I heard him call, “Dr. Don,” he was with their daughter, waiting for her mom. 

I don’t think many of the students at NDNU, or any of the youth, service providers, or street people in The TL, knew who “Don Stannard-Friel” was, but “Dr. Don” was pretty well-known. So, if any of them is searching for me online, it’d be doctordon they’re looking for. If someone does try donstannard-friel.com, that’s available, too, but when they open it, they’re linked to doctordon.org.