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Don't love the NYT piece on the "Dr." controversy, but whatever.
Ugh, the bad takes keep coming. Fuck it, I'm going to do a thread no one asked for to exorcise my irritation.
The problem with that op-ed was not the disrespect for a title, nor even the disrespect for Jill Biden, an individual white woman who is going to be just fine and who hasn't responded to the bullshit at all, as far as I can see.
Yes, I know it's the Wall Street Journal and I know what their op-ed board is like, but that was still an awful lot of racist sexism crammed into one badly written piece.
And it expressed internal contradiction that can only be explained by deference to white masculinity, in this case the white masculinity of a man who has repeatedly been promoted above his credentials while publishing racistsexisthomophobic dreck.
I thought about posting a screenshot of his 1970 piece yesterday after I saw it, but decided against it as potentially too triggering for people who might happen upon it unawares. He uses the N-word to describe the horrible fate of homosexuality.
In that 1970 essay, the worst thing that could befall his white sons is their potential loss of white male supremacy through homosexuality, and he describes this loss with the n-word.
It's a truly ugly piece of writing, but one that was apparently praised by other white writers and editors of the period.
I said yesterday I don't care about the MD vs. PhD thing and I don't, because it's boring, but the NYT piece gets something wrong in a way that reinforces the bigoted intent behind the editorial.
The NYT piece treats this piece as valid, and implies that historically, the title of Dr. was limited to medical doctors. Which...no.
I spend a lot of my time reading British literature of the past, and medical doctors are generally referred to as "Mr" because the title for medical doctors is historically a recent turn.
Academics, on the other hand, have used the title since the medieval era. The credentialing battle was part of the 19th-century turn to make medicine a respectable and credentialed profession.
It was not incidentally also part of a push to remove white women and nonwhite people of all genders from the practice of medicine.
The point isn't that academics own the title and medical doctors shouldn't use it, because this whole part of the argument is the uninteresting part, but the NYT has given air to an ahistorical claim that seems to bolster the racistsexism of the editorial.
The editorial rests on idea that women, particularly Black women (despite the framing around Biden), are stealing valor from medical doctors. The editorial notes that you shouldn't be able to call yourself a doctor unless you've "delivered a baby."
There's a bit of cissexism in this; the assumption that the person giving birth will be a woman, and that the person "delivering" the baby will be a male expert.
Epstein doesn't exactly name this, but it's implied in the sentence structure, in which the anecdote comes from "a wise man."
The title of Dr. is downright ridiculous when used by those who aren't medical doctors. Also, it's too easily earned these days. Also, I don't have one but have had all the jobs that require the credential, but it's actually other people lowering the standards, not me.
The people lowering the standards are people who actually do have the credential, which I know is lower than it used to be because I've sat in on some committees that aren't abusive enough to grad students.
This isn't organized, as I have too much irritation right now. But I'm now seeing people talking about how the argument is actually some elitist thing about academics wanting respect, and most of what I saw was women upset about misogyny.
Some of this upset focused on defending Jill Biden, a person who doesn't really need the defense, and missed out on the racism and more generalized white male supremacy of the piece.
The editorial claims to be about the inherent snobbery of academics stealing medical valor, which is ahistorical and silly. But that is not what it's about, and people taking it at face value are performing a pantomine illiteracy. (koff koff matty koff)
I can no longer access the full article so I can't pull up all the points to which I object, but suffice it to say that he objects specifically to the use of the term in feminized and racialized disciplines. Humanities, ed, etc.
Found a screenshot of the line I was looking for. Will quote below.
“Political correctness has put paid to any true honor an honorary degree may once have possessed. 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.’”
Epstein specifically links decline in value to the inclusion of Black women.
These lines are what the piece is actually about. Epstein, a white man without a graduate degree, taught in the humanities at a university and then edited Phi Beta Kappa's magazine. He's not a member of PBK, either. He does have an honorary doctorate, though.
He did not have the credentials to do the work he was hired to do, work that would require top credentials of any person who wasn't a white man. Respecting the credentials of people who aren't white men threatens his career.
Now, complaints about credentialing are valid. My perspective on this comes in part from the many years I spent as a college dropout. Unlike Mr. Epstein, I didn't have a BA.
I wasn't less intelligent or capable then than I am now, but I was kept out of even applying for many jobs because of my lack of a degree. When I say "kept out," I mean, I tried to fill out online applications and when I couldn't add a bachelor's, it ended the application.
I could have done the work. If anyone had talked to me, it would have been clear that I could do the work. This is where I think complaints about credentialing are valid. There are forms of snobbery, racism, sexism, ableism, classism, etc. bound up in requirements.
But that's not what Mr. Epstein is complaining about, as you see in his paragraph on how it's awful that people today might treat graduate students as human beings. He longs for days when people fainted during exams.
He doesn't seem to have a great grasp on current requirements, either, since he thinks language exams are gone. (They aren't, and they've always been a bit perfunctory, as people who took them longer ago than his "fifteen years" have told me.)
But his snobbery comes out far earlier in the piece. He's not objecting to credentialing, per se, he's objecting to the devaluing of credentials when they're awarded to people who aren't white men, especially for feminized work that benefits lower classes.
Consider "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.'"
The mention of "the University of Delaware" is actually key. He objects that she calls herself doctor when she went to a STATE SCHOOL *gasp*.
And her work is in education, not doctor level work! and it's about community college retention, not the Ivies!
While Epstein taught at Northwestern, Dr. Biden teaches at a community college, and therefore, shouldn't he get more respect than she does?
I am sure some people are objecting to the piece simply to defend their own credentials, but that's not what I'm here for. I have a lot of suspicion for credentialing, although it's tempting to try to meet Mr. Epstein on his own snobbish terms.
A lot of the people he is snobbing at have far more credentials than he does. But that misses the point. He doesn't respect those credentials BECAUSE the people who hold them are not worthy, inherently.
If *those people* can get doctorates, this piece argues, doctorates must not be worth much. Listing your credentials won't move this.
When jobs become feminized and racialized, their value declines, both monetarily and culturally. Phone operators are a classic example. A job that originally paid well and went primarily to men.
Phone companies found that women were better at the job and could be paid less than men, so their monetary value declined, but so did the perception that the jobs required technical expertise and savvy.
In sports, we see this with the changing stereotypes around basketball players as basketball went from being a WASPy sport to one associated with Jews and then Black players.
Epstein's piece has logical contractions that cease to be contradictions when you see what he's truly upset about, and a lot of readers saw that he was indicting them.
Not their credentials, but their persons. He saw their credentials as invalid because of who held them. You couldn't have gotten here on merit, so you must be benefiting from political correctness/affirmative action/the dumbing down of the academy.
He mentions that the title of doctor is eschewed at all your finer universities in the humanities departments. This is patently untrue, but it's also worth noting that the people who can eschew titles are those whose worth is unquestioned.
Re: the NYT piece, here's one example that I think is especially poor and misleading. It lacks context.
I'm pretty sure that the quote refers to medical doctors using the title without credentials, not academics.
But in the context of the piece, it's definitely framed to appear as though the credentials of academics are what's at stake.
The next paragraphs gesture toward what I suspect is its real context, but it's lumped in with their other examples questioning whether an academic "should" use the title.
Which is how the piece is framed, starting with the opening line "Do people who go by Dr. need to carry stethoscopes?"
Although the article endorses the view that it's okay for female academics to go by "Dr.," their examples are a misleading quote about medical history, a female professor who doesn't use the title, but says it's okay to do so, and Miss Manners.
Miss Manners says that her doctorate-holding father found it gauche, but acknowledges it's okayish to use it.
The reason I don't like the NYT article is that it treats the Epstein piece as though it's genuinely about whether it's OK for people who aren't medical doctors to use the title and then goes ahead and treats it as a valid question.
They do not include any of the race aspects of the question, only gender, and the conclusion, implied, is that it's a little gauche, but basically okay.
So yeah, I hate the responses to this because they are ignoring what the editorial was very obviously about and treating this either as a battle between elites over something that doesn't matter or as more seriously about titles.
No real conclusion here, just a lot of irritation.
