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A particular pleasure of my professional life is, at the conclusion of a successful Ph.D. defence, to congratulate the scholar by calling them by their new professional title: Doctor. There’s nothing like the joy and relief and pride in their eyes at that moment. They EARNED it.
What’s more, the title honours the efforts of those who supported, encouraged, and often sacrificed a lot, too, the candidate’s friends, family, mentors, partners and children and grandparents and other loved ones, who may not have always understood but believed in the dream.
A title doesn’t have to be about hierarchy. It can also be about community, and acknowledgment of significant personal achievement in the context of meaningful relationships. Your doctorate earns you the title of doctor, period. Anything less is arbitrary, ahistorical, and wrong.
Representation isn’t everything, and goodness knows there are myriad issues about who gets represented in certain elite spaces; degrees aren’t the entirety of knowledge, wisdom, or achievement. But it matters that more of our own are in these spaces making new things possible.
And that’s the issue. As more from the socio-political margins achieve the degrees, change the disciplines, expand the horizons, reactionaries wail about the “decline of quality” now that their presumed authority is eroding. But they’re the ones devaluing these degrees, not us.
At best it’s petulance, elitism, and manifest insecurity to refuse the title of doctor to someone who’s earned it; at worst, as in the ugly WSJ editorial, it’s rank bigotry. If that’s what they think the doctorate is supposed to be, then we can’t hasten its end soon enough.
In the meantime we can keep working to make the title of Dr mean so much more than can be fathomed by the limiting bigotries of insecure reactionaries.
