There have been amazing outbursts around a Wall Street Journal article that disparages the use of Dr. as an honorific for anyone but MDs. This is about how Dr. Jill Biden, the wife of President-elect Biden, wants to be titled in recognition of her Ed.D. The critic also chose to denigrated her dissertation project and that she is an educator in a community college.
Challenged for the elitism and sexist diminishing of women’s achievements, the Wall Street Journal doubled-down. This peculiar he-said, she-said battle has been joined across the Internet with divisive social-media commentary.
Apart from the probably-misplaced “two-sides” coverage on various media, that bastion of conservative dialectic purity, National Review, managed, as is its wont, to join the fray. The attempted coup de Grace is an egregious own-goal, attracting brilliant rejoinders to its metaphorical excesses.
With regard to the disparagement of community colleges and their value in US public education, Professor Melissa Murray testifies how much community colleges serve actual communities, providing affordable, accredited educational pathways along with continuing education in many forms.
National Review might expect readers to snort their superior approval of “teaching remedial English to slow learners in community colleges” to “being a rock musician who’s in a bar band. That plays covers. At mixers. Held in assisted-living facilities.” In one fell swoop, teaching is diminished in yet another way.
With regard to cover bands, Dr. Ian Cromwell, a Ph.D who performed in cover bands for many years, provides a brilliant explanation of why and how that is valuable and, most of all, what music is for. Even bands who achieve fame for their original tunes end up covering themselves, like it or not, trapped in a Hotel California of their own devising. And sometimes, they might show up in a bar and sit in. If you don’t get that, watch “The Queen’s Gambit” through to the end again.
It is heartening that some with philanthropic instincts and resources are also more generous in support for non-elite institutions.
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