Some ignorant, scum-sucking, shit-weasel at the Wall Street Journal wrote an opinion piece that moronsplained to Dr. Jill Biden and I couldn’t let it stand.
Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not if You Need an M.D.
Jill Biden should think about dropping the honorific, which feels fraudulent, even comic.
Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the “Dr.” before your name? “Dr. Jill Biden ” sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic. Your degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title “Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs.”
She earned a Doctorate in Education. That is an actual doctorate that required writing and defending a dissertation.
A wise man once said that no one should call himself “Dr.” unless he has delivered a child. Think about it, Dr. Jill, and forthwith drop the doc.
That is a fucking bullshit standard. That guy wasn’t a wise man.
I taught at Northwestern University for 30 years without a doctorate or any advanced degree. I have only a B.A. in absentia from the University of Chicago—in absentia because I took my final examination on a pool table at Headquarters Company, Fort Hood, Texas, while serving in the peacetime Army in the late 1950s. I do have an honorary doctorate, though I have to report that the president of the school that awarded it was fired the year after.
Everything that comes next is this dude manifesting his inferiority complex.
I was also often addressed as Dr. during the years I was editor of the American Scholar, the quarterly magazine of Phi Beta Kappa. I also received a fair amount of correspondence from people who appended the initials Ph.D. to their names atop their letterheads, and have twice seen PHD on vanity license plates, which struck me as pathetic. In contemporary universities, in the social sciences and humanities, calling oneself Dr. is thought bush league.
No, it’s not. Generally, among colleagues, people are informal. During formal correspondence, the title is still used. I don’t request that coworkers call me doctor, but I would be addressed as doctor in a formal setting such as if I were giving a deposition or testimony as an expert witness.
The Ph.D. may once have held prestige, but that has been diminished by the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards in university education generally, at any rate outside the sciences.
Eat my ass. Maybe in some schools in some degree programs, but not all. Fuck you.
Getting a doctorate was then an arduous proceeding: One had to pass examinations in two foreign languages, one of them Greek or Latin, defend one’s thesis, and take an oral examination on general knowledge in one’s field. At Columbia University of an earlier day, a secretary sat outside the room where these examinations were administered, a pitcher of water and a glass on her desk. The water and glass were there for the candidates who fainted. A far cry, this, from the few doctoral examinations I sat in on during my teaching days, where candidates and teachers addressed one another by first names and the general atmosphere more resembled a kaffeeklatsch.
I don’t know about the two languages thing, but that feels like something from the liberal arts. In science, I had to stand at a whiteboard and do fucking calculus by hand while being grilled by a dozen professors. Physics, chemistry, interfacial phenomenon, thermodynamic derivations from memory.
It was traditional that once the exam was over, assuming that you passed, your professor took you out to the bar across campus to buy you a beer.
It was arduous.
Dr. Jill, I note you acquired your Ed.D. as recently as 15 years ago at age 55, or long after the terror had departed.
Fuck you, you old fucking geezer. You don’t what she went through.
As for your Ed.D., Madame First Lady, hard-earned though it may have been, please consider stowing it, at least in public, at least for now. Forget the small thrill of being Dr. Jill, and settle for the larger thrill of living for the next four years in the best public housing in the world as First Lady Jill Biden.
No.
In fact, I want Dr. Biden to go as “Doctor Biden” more because of this shit.
I do not like how in America, the medical doctor has become the only acceptable doctor. This OpEd and the attitude that goes with it only reinforces that bullshit.
The word Doctor itself comes from Latin for “teacher.” The title of Doctor dates back to the 13th Century will the beginning of the university system as we know it. To be able to teach in a Medieval University, one needed a licentia docendi, a “license to teach.” This was earned through rigorous academic effort, and where the Doctor of Philosophy took root.
The earliest licentia docendi or Ph.D.s were awarded in theology, philosophy, or the natural sciences.
Medicine was no were near that list.
Medince was mostly unscientific and bloody well into the 19th Century. You were as likely to see your barber for a minor surgery as you were a physician. Likewise, you were more likely to see your apothecary or herbalist than a physician for pharmacology.
Doctors were “sawbones” since among the most common procedures for doctors to perform were amputations. Prior to the widespread use of analgesics, most surgeries were too painful to be performed. The patient would die of shock or would thrash around and die.
The uniform of the doctor was the leather apron, same as the butcher, to keep himself from being covered in blood and bile.
Remember that as late as the mid 1800s, midwives were preferred to physicians for delivering babies, since doctors had a much higher mortality rate. When Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that physicians had “cadaverous particles” on their hands and that is what caused birthing fever, he was kicked out of medicine and repudiated with “a gentleman’s hands are always clean.”
Only with the introduction of scientific medicine in the late 1800’s, largely as a result of surgery that could be performed with anesthesia and an understanding of sterility, did the physician start to be something more professional than just a sawbones. The treatment of the injured from WWI and the introduction of antibiotics in the interwar period accelerated that.
At the same time, there was a push to use the title to separate those with M.D.s from quacks who sold elixirs and cure-alls.
The M.D., like the J.D., was considered to be a professional degree, not an academic one. In England to this day, a surgeon is still “Mr./Ms.” and is only called “Doctor” when they have a Ph.D.
In the US, the M.D. became “Doctor” as M.D.s were involved in research and publication and was considered tantamount to Ph.D.s.
I will add to this, M.D.s have board exams for licensure but do not have a dissertation defense. So if this prick thinks that modern Ph.D.s shouldn’t be called doctor because their academic finale isn’t sufficiently rigorous, M.D.s definitely don’t deserve it.
The point is, the Ph.D. has been a “doctor” since the 1200s and the physician has been a doctor since the 1800s.
The medical profession doesn’t get to take the title away from academia.
This whole OpEd is about this guy, who has spent his career in academia without a Ph.D., feeling insecure and now wanting to shit on someone else with a terminal degree because it makes him feel a little bit better.
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