What’s Really Behind The Flap Over Jill Biden’s Doctorate
It's part of a general scorn for the "softer" precincts of academia--especially education.
Criticism of Jill Biden for using the honorific “Dr.” has been snide and unfair, but it isn’t just misogyny. It also reflects longstanding disdain for the discipline in which Biden earned her doctorate: education.
A recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal took the prospective first lady to task for preferring to be addressed as “Dr.” The op-ed has been roundly criticized, primarily for being—as one letter to the editor with 330 signatures put it—“outrageously sexist.”
To be sure, the op-ed was patronizing in a way that makes it hard to imagine it having been written about a man. The author, Joseph Epstein—an 83-year-old who has long reveled in political incorrectness, including swipes at feminism—addressed Biden as “kiddo.” It’s unlikely he would have used that term in connection with, say, future “second gentleman” Doug Emhoff. But the overall thrust of the piece was not so much anti-female as anti what Epstein sees as academic pretentiousness.
According to Epstein, only medical doctors should be addressed as “Dr.” (He’s not alone: standard AP Style urges caution about using “Dr.” for those with non-medical doctorates, to avoid confusion.) Maybe things were different in the old days, Epstein writes, when oral exams were so rigorous that “a secretary sat outside the room” with “a pitcher of water and a glass” in case the doctoral candidate fainted. Even now, he suggests, people with doctorates in the hard sciences—physics, chemistry, and the like—are entitled to use “Dr.,” but not those in the humanities and social sciences. And he notes that Biden’s doctorate is merely an Ed.D—a doctorate in education, not a Ph.D.—obtained via a dissertation with what he calls an “unpromising” title: “Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs.”
Given the high dropout rate in community colleges, it’s not clear why such a title is “unpromising.” More likely, Epstein assumed that Biden’s research was lacking in rigor. That assumption has been made explicit—and nastier—by right-wing commentators. One has called the Ed.D. “something of a joke in the academic world,” and a degree that “only deeply unimpressive people feel confers the honorific of ‘Doctor.’” They have combed Biden’s dissertation for typos and errors, declaring it “barely fit for a middle-school Social Studies classroom” and of a quality that “wouldn’t be tolerated in a high-school paper.”
These attacks are hugely unfair. Biden’s dissertation is 137 pages long, with 80 pages of text plus references and appendices. It’s based not only on her reading of academic sources but also on surveys she designed and administered to community college students, faculty, and guidance counselors and interviews she conducted. It has some sound, specific recommendations—for example, to teach writing in all classes, not just English. Yes, there are typos and a few infelicitous phrases, but compared to a lot of academic writing, it’s admirably clear.
At the same time, the dissertation—also referred to as an “executive position paper”—is not particularly scientific. It doesn’t present a hypothesis that can be proven or disproven, it wasn’t designed in a way that makes it possible for others to test out its conclusions by replicating it, and it certainly wasn’t a randomized controlled trial—an experiment in which one group is given a “treatment” (e.g., writing instruction in all classes) that another similar group didn’t get.
But that’s not an argument against the validity of Biden’s research in particular. It reflects a general difference between standards for research in education and those found in other fields—including some of the “softer” sciences like psychology—that adhere to what is called the scientific method.
Research in education has generally differed from that in other academic areas, partly because many professors of education have valued ideology as much as evidence—or sometimes more. Professors of education have been heard to dismiss the mountain of evidence in support of teaching phonics as “your science, not my science,” as though science were a belief system.
It doesn’t help that schools of education are largely cut off from—and often scorned by—the rest of academia. In recent decades, there have been significant advances in the science of learning, but prospective teachers don’t become acquainted with them during their training. Research professors at schools of education may be familiar with those findings, but the instructors who train teachers are generally unaware of them—and certainly aren’t incorporating them into their research.
There’s surely a place for the kind of research reflected in Biden’s dissertation—case studies rather than large-scale experiments—but it’s distressing that education research, and teacher training in general, isn’t more grounded in science. If it were, it could make K-12 teachers’ jobs a lot easier—and Biden’s job as a community college English instructor easier as well.
One of the recurring themes in Biden’s dissertation is that students arrive in college unprepared for college-level work. In addition to devoting more attention to writing, she calls for a “study skills program” that might focus on things like test-taking and “finding the main idea.” But one reason so many college students arrive unprepared is the assumption in K-12 schools that these kinds of “skills” are what education should prioritize over specific knowledge. Relying on their training, teachers are likely to believe that teachers should avoid explicit instruction as much as possible, and that there’s no point in ensuring students learn facts when they can just Google them. Both of these assumptions are contradicted by scientific evidence.
Rather than being derided for claiming an honorific she spent 15 years earning, Jill Biden should be celebrated for her dedication to some of our neediest students. She should be applauded for returning to teaching English at Northern Virginia Community College even after she becomes first lady. And instead of wasting any more energy debating whether she should be addressed as “Dr.,” let’s focus on what we can do to make teaching easier for teachers like her—and learning easier for students.
This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.