This may get long, so buckle up, grab a drink, and please keep you feet and hands inside the vehicle at all times.
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| That's Dr. Biden to you, AFS |
Of course, in Curmie’s mind, the absolute worst part of the administration in which President-elect Biden served was its education policy, headed by the idiot Arne Duncan. (The fact that Betsy DeVos would make literally anyone look good by comparison doesn’t mean Duncan was competent... or even honest.) Here’s hoping that Dr. Biden will be able to steer Hubby towards policies that care more about teaching and learning and less about bureaucracy, corporatization, and faux “accountability.”
Curmie will not mention the op-ed author’s name, since getting his (you know it’s “his,” not “her”) name into the public discussion seems to be the entire point of his missive. Rather, I yield to the appellation applied by the inimitable Wonkette: the author shall be forevermore simply “absolute fucking shithead,” or AFS for short.
Nor will I link to the article, which even the mullet-wrapper the WSJ has become in the Murdoch years ought to be ashamed to have published: no more clicks on that drivel than necessary. Curmie did read the piece, in the spirit of taking one for the team. He read it so you, Gentle Reader, don’t have to. This is as close to altruism as you’re going to get from Curmie; better take advantage of it now. Here is the opening paragraph of AFS’s tantrum:
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.” 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.
OK, AFS, let’s get this straight. Do not, under any circumstances, address anyone you don’t know well, much less the future FLOTUS, as “kiddo.” You, sir, have earned your AFS title for committing aggravated assholitude and pomposity in the first degree, yet Curmie won’t call you “kiddo.” Second: there is nothing whatsoever fraudulent, much less comic, about someone with a doctorate referring to herself as “Dr.” Finally, if you had a basic understanding of the English language, AFS, you’d know that “delivering a child” has two meanings. Obstetricians and midwives fit one definition. Mothers fit the other. Jill Biden has given birth, therefore she has delivered a child. Oh, and it's “Madam,” not “Madame.” Seriously, AFS, don’t shoot yourself in the foot like that. At least provide us with a challenge.
Ah, but her dissertation had an “unpromising title.” Curmie seems to recall some adage about books and covers… how did that go, again? And is AFS condemning a work of scholarship because he can understand the title or because he fears he couldn’t understand the text itself? Is blogger Amanda Kohlhofer correct in saying that AFS’s first paragraph amounts to “a whole lot of words to say ‘I’m intimidated by women smarter than me.’”? Quite possibly, although one hardly requires a doctorate to demonstrate intellectual superiority to AFS. The average rutabaga clears that hurdle.
AFS then goes on a semi-coherent ramble about how he doesn’t have a doctorate but is (or at least was) not infrequently addressed as “Dr.” The relevance of this little excursion into toxic humble-bragging is not entirely clear to Curmie, who does indeed have a PhD that essentially suggests the ability to determine what is meant by a particular piece of text. What is manifest is that the reason AFS discounts doctorates is that he doesn’t have one. There’s a story about that phenomenon, too… it has a fox in it… and maybe some grapes? Curmie, though nearly two decades younger than AFS, is getting along in years, and the memory isn’t what it once was. Ahem.
Oh, one more point. AFS would have us believe that “In contemporary universities, in the social sciences and humanities, calling oneself Dr. is thought bush league.” 1). How the hell would he know? 2). Bullshit. Introducing oneself by saying “Hello, I’m Dr. X” may be a bit a tad pretentious in many circumstances, but Curmie uses his name followed by a comma and “PhD” on his business cards and “Dr.” in the signature block of his work e-mail. Moreover, whereas students are encouraged to call me by my first name (and the overwhelming majority do so), if I’m doing a recruiting event, the students helping me are told to refer to me as “Dr.” when in earshot of prospectives’ parents. Parents like to know there’s a PhD in the house, even if they intellectually understand that the MFA is the more appropriate degree for many subdisciplines.
And I don’t like being called “Mr.” by people who should know better. The receptionist at the optometrist’s office, the bank teller, the guy who fixed our furnace a while back: they can call me “Mr.” But people I know in my professional capacity have three choices: my first name (actually one of the standard nicknames for my “real” first name), “Doctor,” or “Professor.” I suppose I’d answer to “President” if the context were appropriate (I am president of a national honor society), but it would be weird.
AFS then grumbles about how the PhD has become “diminished by the erosion of seriousness” in fields outside the sciences. Used to be, quoth he, that earning a doctorate was “arduous.” (Could this be AFS’s excuse for not having one? Naaa…) Back then, in the days of the primordial ooze, apparently, a candidate “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.” Let’s see: Curmie took two sets of written exams (one on-site and timed, the other take-home) and an oral exam in general knowledge, defended his dissertation, and… oh, yeah, his foreign languages: French, Ancient Greek, and German. Wait, that’s three languages. (Curmie confesses that his German was never very good.) Curiously, this means Curmie fulfilled all those arcane requirements of the dim and distant past. News flash: Curmie is old, but not that old, and the road to a PhD hasn’t changed much since Curmie’s grad student days.
AFS would know, if he’d ever been through the process, that the admission to candidacy exam—the general knowledge in the field exam that is still very much a part of virtually all doctoral programs—is the real hurdle: you’re in a room with specialists whose job it is to ask you increasingly difficult questions in their specialty until you can’t answer one or two. Then they make a determination about how much you did know and, equally importantly, if you admitted ignorance or tried to bullshit when confronted with that unanswerable question.
Curmie remembers vividly a couple of moments from that oral exam. One question was to identify playwrights and directors who famously collaborated with each other frequently. Curmie named two or three pairs immediately, only to be told “there’s one more I’m thinking of…” Curmie blanked, and had a vision of his academic future circling the bowl. The professor then provided the name of the director, Curmie quickly responded with the playwright… and exhaled.
The dissertation defense per se has been something of a formality for decades, at least. Whereas in the earlier orals, everyone in the room knows more about their particular area than the student does, the tables are turned now. The candidate knows more about his or her specific topic than literally anyone, and everyone on the committee has de facto signed off on the diss before the defense. How do I know? Well, in part because that’s the way Curmie’s father, who earned his PhD in Botany in the 1940s, described the process, and that’s what Curmie saw in Theatre at a different university half a century later. Of course, AFS wouldn’t be expected to know that…
While we’re on the subject, Curmie’s discussion wandered off into the realm of the PhD because AFS’s did. But Dr. Biden’s degree is an EdD. Curmie doesn’t know what, exactly, the University of Delaware required in that degree program 15 years ago. Neither, I’m willing to bet, does AFS. But Curmie is willing to grant on faith that there was at least some rigor involved.
But as if discussions of the PhD aren’t irrelevant enough, AFS now launches into a screed about honorary doctorates. Let’s see: Dr. Biden, who has an earned EdD, shouldn’t call herself “Dr.” because honorary PhDs don’t mean anything. Got it. Either AFS is an addle-pated old fool or he needs to share what he’s smoking.
A couple of final points. Kohlhofer points to a tweet by the good folks at Meriam-Webster noting that the word “doctor” comes from the Latin word for “teach.” Curmie can’t find the M-W tweet, but that is indeed the term’s etymology. In other words, according to one of those classical languages AFS seems to value, Dr. Biden, who has spent ample time at the front of a classroom, has more claim to the title than those physician types who elbowed their way into the term literally over a millennium after the word was first employed.
Second, both Wonkette and Kohlhofer are women. Curmie is not. Whether that’s relevant or not, Curmie will leave for you to decide. There is certainly an undercurrent of sexism (and racism) in AFS’s remarks, no more so than in the glib statement that “If you are ever looking for a simile to denote rarity, try ‘rarer than a contemporary university honorary-degree list not containing an African-American woman.’” But is it true that “this would NEVER have been written about a man”? Curmie isn’t so sure, although the assertion is more likely true than false.
What is certainly true is that women in the academy, especially if they’re young and (God forbid!) attractive, have a much harder time getting the respect they deserve. Curmie was in his 40s when he got his doctorate. He’s over 6’ tall, has a big and reasonably deep voice, and… oh, yes… a beard. All those seemingly trivial points did indeed translate into relative advantages. And Curmie has no reason to disbelieve female friends and colleagues who tell of precisely the kind of devaluation of their credentials that AFS attempts to perpetrate against Dr. Biden.
Curmie closes with a personal note. No one has ever suggested that Curmie not self-identify as “Dr.” But there is this: four years ago, Curmie served as Interim Director of the School of Theatre at his university. At the big opening all-university meeting, everyone taking on new administrative responsibilities was asked to stand and be recognized by the crowd. Because “Theatre” comes pretty late in the alphabet, there were a dozen or so other folks introduced before Curmie. Literally every intro was “Dr. So-and-So is the new Associate Dean of Whatzit,” “Dr. Whatshername is the new Chair of the Such-and-Such Department,” and so on. Then it was Curmie’s turn: just my name.
Several friends teasingly wondered if my doctoral alma mater had revoked my degree or something. In the grand scheme of things, such mini-slights matter little.
Would this make the top 100 grievances of Curmie’s career at his current institution? Not a chance. Does he still remember it over four years after it happened? Oh, yes. And I’ve never quite forgiven that Provost.
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