TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — I HAVE never been big on titles. Many people I interact with outside my job don’t even know that I am a professor, or that I have a doctoral degree. When I introduce myself in public, I’m Carlotta Berry.

But when I introduce myself in the classroom, I’m Dr. Berry. And I insist on being Dr. Berry.

Titles in the academy are inconsistent at best. I have colleagues who would prefer to be called by their first name, or nicknames like “Bone Saw.” But they are mostly men, and almost all white, and they have that luxury. As an African-American woman in a mostly Caucasian- and male-dominated field, I don’t.

Some find my insistence on this formality a bit pretentious or arrogant. But they don’t understand my story, and that of many other women and people of color in the academy.

Having worked with thousands of students, I know for a fact that for many — though by no means all, or even most — there is already a presumption that I, as a female and African-American, am less qualified than my white male colleagues, or at the very least that I was hired in order to meet a double minority quota. And I get it — anti-affirmative-action ideologues have managed to not only demolish the legitimacy of that policy, but tar the reputation of anyone who might have benefited from it (even if, like me, they did not).