"Her dissertation is not an addition to the sum total of human knowledge."
"You can tell someone is smarting from an inferiority complex when he insists on being addressed as “Dr.” on the basis of holding an academic doctorate rather than being a physician. Ph.D. holders who have genuine accomplishments don’t make you call them “Doctor,” which is why you never hear about “Dr. Paul Krugman” and “Dr. George Will.” None of the professors I knew at Yale, even the ones who were eminent in their fields, insisted on the title, and I think most of them would have scoffed if someone had addressed them as “Dr.” The only reason you ever hear the phrase “Dr. Henry Kissinger” is that Kissy grew up in title-mad, airs-and-graces Germany, where people are awed rather than dismissive even if you insist on a triple-serving title (“Herr Professor Doktor”).
"Insisting on being called “Doctor” when you don’t heal people is, among most holders of doctorates, seen as a gauche, silly, cringey ego trip. Consider “Dr.” Jill Biden, who doesn’t even hold a Ph.D. but rather a lesser Ed.D., something of a joke in the academic world. President-elect Joe Biden once explained that his wife sought the degree purely for status reasons: “She said, ‘I was so sick of the mail coming to Sen. and Mrs. Biden. I wanted to get mail addressed to Dr. and Sen. Biden.’ That’s the real reason she got her doctorate,” Joe Biden has said.
. . . Mrs. Biden until recently taught English composition at NoVa, a small community college in Northern Virginia. To justify addressing her as “Dr.” would require a generous view of what constitutes an “academic,” and judging by the writing skills evinced by her students (“She very bad teacher and it is hard to pass class. I RECOMMEND NOT TAKE THIS PROFESSOR”), they emerged from her tutelage lacking mastery of even very basic grammar. As for the contents of the dissertation, which she cobbled together from a few secondary sources and some vapid interviews and questionnaires she sent around at the campus where she worked before her husband became vice president, Delaware Technical Community College, I’ll go over them in detail in my next column.
Tucker: The level of shilling for Biden is nauseating
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