The Wall Street Journal ill-advisedly published an opinion piece Friday that ridiculed incoming first lady Jill Biden for professionally referring to herself as Dr. Jill Biden.
“Dr. Jill Biden sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic,” wrote Joseph Epstein, a long-ago lecturer at Northwestern University, maintaining that only those who had delivered babies were deserving of the title “Dr.”
In the piece, Epstein patronizingly calls Biden, “kiddo.”
Biden, age 69, holds two master’s degrees and a doctor in education degree from the University of Delaware. She has a long teaching career, including high schools and community colleges. Since 2009, she has been a professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, a Washington, D.C. suburb.
When her husband, Joe, takes office as president of the United States next month, Biden plans to continue teaching, just as she did when he served as vice president for eight years under Barack Obama.
It’s our guess that the sexist Epstein and his ilk will have a beef with that, too.
Epstein ridicules higher education as nothing more than an ego-boosting exercise.
“I taught at Northwestern University for 30 years without a doctorate or any advanced degree,” he writes.
That was then.
Epstein, age 83, left Northwestern 20 years ago.
Today, a bachelor’s degree barely gets your foot in the door for a job in higher education. Aspirations of advancement — moving into administration or securing tenure — usually require a doctorate. And the idea that earning a doctorate in education or architecture or public administration is any less grueling than those of the sciences only shows a profound ignorance of their depths.
Since Friday’s piece, Northwestern University has removed Epstein’s profile from its website, calling his article, “misogynistic.”
HATEFUL speech is not foreign to Epstein.
In the 1970s, he condemned homosexuality in an essay for Harper’s Magazine, calling gay people “cursed” and “an affront to our rationality.” This story would never have been written about a man.Douglas Emhoff, husband of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris
That the Wall Street Journal would give a bigot such as Epstein a global audience is to its discredit.
Douglas Emhoff, the husband of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, and an attorney, put Epstein’s piece into perspective by saying, “This story would never have been written about a man.”
