printShe’s a lowly community college instructor. She holds a PhD in education, one of the most intellectually debased, easy subject matters in academia. When you can’t do much else, intellectually, you go into education. One of the reasons America’s kids are so dumb: Unionized educators. Yet the moron media insist on appending the honorific “Dr” to Jill Biden’s name whenever they mention her taxpayer-sponsored existence.
You know just how insufferable Jill Biden is when even the La Times and Washington Post language experts recoil at Mrs. Biden’s unwarranted airs and graces:
“Ordinarily when someone goes by doctor and they are a PhD, not an MD, I find it a little bit obnoxious,” Sullivan said. …
… Newspapers, including The Times, generally do not use the honorific “Dr.” unless the person in question has a medical degree.
“My feeling is if you can’t heal the sick, we don’t call you doctor,” said Bill Walsh, copy desk chief for the Washington Post’s A section and the author of two language books.
Aren’t you grateful her husband, Joe Not-A-Doctor Biden, is not running for office again? Do you know how often you’d hear the undeserved honorific “Dr” before this pestilence’s name?
This writer’s spouse won’t like it, but in the US we don’t call PhD’s doctors (apostrophe is warranted in the plural usage of an abbreviation, I believe). It’s considered the height of pomposity. Granted, a PhD in electrical engineering, conferred at the age of 25, is certainly incomparable intellectually to a PhD in fluff like education.
Moreover, one has to consider, too, the original definition of a PhD:
“Doctor of Philosophy: a doctorate awarded for original contributions to knowledge [in the field].”
Most PhD’s today, even in the cerebral, demanding field of applied science, do not quite meet the requirement of an original contributions to knowledge in their field. And they are practically given away to women in technology.
Check out the “academic” profile of “a public-spirited ditz named Danah Boyd,” who is “Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, and a Research Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.”
It’s a disgrace.
Jokes like Jill Biden and Microsoft’s Danah Boyd abound. They are not statistical outliers.
UPDATE: Fun on Facebook. Join us:
Jim Ostrowski: “I often call myself doctor cuz I have a JD. But I make it optional for others.”
Ilana Mercer: “Jim Ostrowski, You’re brilliant. The best lawyers are. Like philosophy, law is the application of abstract principles to facts and reality. Philosophy is thinking about thinking. Electrical engineering is applying the laws of physics to make things that work. Education is … dumb-assery.”