Dr. Biden, Mr. Epstein and the Culture War
A few months ago, in frustration of being addressed by the wrong title by people who knew better, I took to social media to issue the following PSA:
Image description: A Facebook post by the author with the message “PSA: if someone has a doctorate, call them doctor. (And don’t think I don’t notice that women are disproportionately the ones not getting their titles acknowledged)” and two comic panels in which Dr. Doom announces “My full title is DOCTOR!”
What I meant, of course, was not that everyone had to stop calling me by my first name, but that if we’re doing the Mr. Smith and Ms. Jones and Mrs. Green thing, I’m Dr. Dickman-Burnett. I honestly just wanted to clear up the misconception that there are a lot of people out there who go through the trouble of earning a doctorate and just didn’t use the title.
What I did not expect was that people would take issue with this and that there would be a whole discussion about how “I just needed to understand and be respectful of people whose values were ‘more traditional.’” To spell out the subtext here: among more conservative people (at least some), recognizing a woman’s PhD over her marriage goes against their beliefs. I could go on about how I find these values outdated, but I digress. Ultimately, this was a small conversation taking place on my feed, and I moved on.
Between then and now, there was an election, and we now have a FLOTUS elect with a doctorate, which is a historical first. Enter professional bad opinion-haver Joseph Epstein, who decided: 1. A think piece arguing against referring to Dr. Biden by her title was appropriate, and 2. The best way to do this was to refer to her as “kiddo.” I won’t link the article. If you’re having trouble finding it, the most educated women you know on social media and any contrarian conservatives or libertarians you might know will likely be defending it.
But the piece contains this particular gem, which gets to the crux of why I’m giving the article a substantial piece of my day off and bothering to dignify it with a response : “The Ph.D. may once have held prestige, but that has been diminished by the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards in university education generally.”
The idea that the college experience has been diluted is one that has a lot of traction among a certain flavor of the right wing set. Generally white, male, and tending to fashion themselves as right wing intellectuals, tend to adopt the stance that university education is meaningless because universities are “less rigorous” than they were in their sepia-toned halcyon days. Epstein is rare in that he was actually around for those days, but the logic of the argument is still specious.
While at on it’s face, concerns about quality of education are not intrinsically bad faith arguments, and the impact of the commodification of education and grade inflation have been documented, underlying this particular argument is the idea that as the pool of people who gained access to university education has become more diverse, the value of a university education has less value. The subtext here is that white men are intrinsically smart, and when people other than white men started attending universities, they had to make it easier.
The reality of the situation is that grade inflation has a few causes, the most prominent of which was actually to protect male students from the draft, not to make things easier for students of color or women. But it is noteworthy that when the only people with widespread access to education were rich white men, their educational attainment was touted as evidence of their superiority. As soon as universities allowed everyone else an opportunity to enter, suddenly earning a degree — a point of counterevidence to the early claim — becomes meaningless.
Among the criticism of Epstein, we see critiques of condescending misogyny (“kiddo”), his devaluation of doctorates and faulty logic, his elitist attacks on community colleges, and the fact that he deems himself arbiter of which titles should be acknowledged. But beyond the garden variety sexism of a man not wanting to recognize a woman’s credentials when they outstrip his, there are bigger issues at play. The underlying arguments about the value of a university degree is reflective of systemic sexism and racism that yearns for a past in which the university belonged to white men. At its core, this argument is not much different than Trumpism, it just hides itself better.
