When Does Someone Deserve to be Called “Doctor”?
By: Taylor Dotson
Tags: Academia, Joe Biden, Election 2020, Politics, PhD

Joseph Epstein’s recent Wall Street Journal op-ed has been controversial to say the least. While his article is ostensibly penned as a personal letter to the future first lady, Jill Biden, urging her to not so adamantly insist on being called “Doctor”, his main focus is on what he sees as the “watering down” of the academic doctorate.

Much of the fury directed at Epstein (and the Wall Street Journal for publishing it) has focused on signs that he was possibly more motivated by sexism than a good faith exploration of what honorific Doctor should mean. He doesn’t help his case by being informal to the point of condescension. I mean, he referred to her as “kiddo”! Even though a more charitable interpretation exists: Epstein was playing off of future President Biden’s own rhetorical style, that allusion was not clear to nearly all readers.

Given both their of their ages and career experience, Jill Biden and Joseph Epstein are obviously peers. If Epstein had wanted more people to take him seriously, he would have avoided seeming to talk down to the future first lady. Put in context of the long hard road that women have had to fight to get themselves taken seriously within fields like academia, his approach is tone deaf, if not worse.

I made the mistake on Twitter of trying to engage with the non-sexist part Epstein’s thesis. (Yes, I am really that bad at social media). As unsavory as the history of women’s credentials being disrespected is, I don’t think we should let that history totally overshadow all the other readings of Epstein’s argument. Certainly one can argue that discussing whether a PhD really merits being called Doctor should wait until our society is more equal. But that is different than the implication that the question is sexist on its face.

Regardless, Epstein’s focus is on the increasing ease with which PhDs can be obtained. Exams on Greek and Latin have been dispensed with. More and more PhDs are being minted every year. And honorary doctorates are seemingly handed out to anyone with a sizable donation to offer or even a middling level of celebrity.

I think debating the “difficulty” of the degree is the wrong question. Any kind of credential could be made excessively arduous so as to weed out most of the students that attempt it.

When I get introduced as Doctor, I usually qualify with a jokey line that my father-in-law used to add, “But not the kind that helps people.” The sensibility at the heart of that joke is what lies at the crux of the issue. The extra respect that medical professionals receive is not simply due to the difficulty of obtaining a medical degree. Though, even in that line of thought, it is easy to forget that medical doctors have to take difficult licensing exams, pursue continuing education, and can face potential discipline by a professional governing body — things that PhDs are almost nowhere subject to.

Rather, the most important difference between MDs and PhDs is that the former take the Hippocratic Oath. They publicly commit to using their knowledge to help others, although they can and sometimes do fall fall short of that aspiration. The beneficiaries of the work of PhDs are often unclear. The cliché that PhDs are motivated purely by curiosity or knowledge for knowledge’s sake obscures a troubling reality. The most reliable benefits of academic work accrue to the researcher themselves (in terms of professional status) and to the small clique of scholars they associate with. No doubt there are exceptions, such as when PhDs admirably choose to work on “applied” problems. But those researchers usually take a big hit professionally by doing so.

If PhDs are to earn the Doctor label they should be required to take an analogous oath, one that commits them to using scholarship to benefit at least some small group of people who do not hold PhDs. The attitude that PhDs are entitled to the status of Doctor because they successfully wrote a dissertation, in my mind, inevitably culminates in a narcissistic form of elitism. Status should be a product of how a person serves others, not something awarded because they survived a largely arbitrary academic gauntlet.

One of the major oversights that Epstein made in his piece was that he failed to take seriously the difference between a PhD and the degree that Jill Biden actually has, an EdD. Educational doctorate programs are designed to enable graduates to apply their knowledge to situations that are likely to be encountered in real-life educational settings. It is a credential that sets up graduates to do good in the world, not just produce knowledge for other academics. So, in light of my own argument, Jill Biden is more befitting of the Doctor honorific than I am. That is a more exciting and interesting conclusion than I thought would have come from engaging with Epstein’s sexist op-ed, one that is worth considering.