"Doctor" Jill Biden is Neither a Doctor, Nor a Jill, Nor a Biden. Discuss.

As for Jill Biden not really being a Biden, check out this Benny Johnson video, in which he flashes back to 2020. I completely forgot about this -- Jill Biden's first husband said in 2020 that Jill and Joe were both cheating on their respective spouses with each other. Joe Biden's wife was later killed in a collision in which she was at fault, but Joe keeps claiming she was killed by a "truck driver who drank his lunch."

Jill Biden was Joe Biden's babysitter.

Also, Jill Biden's husband was Joe's friend and political donor. Good Old Joe decided to have a sexual affair with his wife.

It sure sounds like Joe was on the way to divorcing her had she not been tragically killed.

About the "doctor" business:

The left is trying to cancel Megyn Kelly (again) because she points out that Dr. Jill Biden is not a doctor. But her insistence on being called "doctor" is pathological.

Lefties are shrieking in response to her doubling down on refusing to call "Doctor" Jill Biden "doctor." See the comments. Lefties have never heard such an outrage.

And also, these "journalists."

You semi-remember David Shuster and Roland Martin, right? I mean -- vaguely?

Note that Martin says a Ph.D. holder is a real doctor.

Too bad she doesn't have a Ph.D.!

Also, David, she didn't write a dissertation, nor did she have to defend it. That's something Ph.D. candidates have to do.

She is merely a holder of a weaksauce Ed.D. And no dissertation or dissertation defense was required for that.

A dissertation defense is where you must stand before a panel of experts in your field who criticize your work and point out what they believe are errors or faulty conclusions, and you are required to offer cogent rebuttals in real-time. This is an extremely stressful, high-level-cognitive thing, because if you fail to defend your thesis and sound like you're not quite sure what you're talking about, you will fail, and you won't get your Ph.D. Years of research and writing will be in vain.

Can you schedule another dissertation defense? Maybe, I don't know. I bet you they'd make you wait a year or two before doing so, because they don't want unprepared people breezing in figuring, "One of these days I'll just get lucky and pass the defense." They want you to treat this as if it's a Now or Never thing.

Anyway, "Doctor" Jill does not have the degree these men say make your a doctor, nor did she go through the difficult steps required to get such a degree.

She made this point on her podcast last week:

RedState's Nick Arama points out that the media has a rule that they don't refer to even Ph.D's by the honorific "doctor" except in certain cases. But they scrapped that rule because "Doctor" Jill insisted they call her "doctor."

Yes, let's start with the principle that if you have earned an Ed.D., you have a "doctorate." Even if you have a poorly written, inconsequential mess of a position paper that earned you that degree from a school connected to your husband.

More on that position paper later.

But normally outside of academia, it was considered pretentious to insist on people calling you "Dr." and that's what I think Kelly is saying there.

The funny thing about this is that it was the general policy of much of the media in the past not to refer to anyone even with a Ph.D. as a "Dr.," much less an Ed.D. That was reserved for medical doctors, dentists, and the like.

As the Los Angeles Times wrote back in 2009 when they were writing about Jill Biden (but could still be honest about her and Joe):

Newspapers, including The Times, generally do not use the honorific "Dr." unless the person in question has a medical degree.

"My feeling is if you can't heal the sick, we don't call you doctor," said Bill Walsh, copy desk chief for the Washington Post's A section and the author of two language books.

As the Times noted, they wrote how Joe said Jill wanted to get the doctorate because she felt she was "second-class" when the mail was addressed to "Sen. and Mrs. Biden." That says so much about her right there. It wasn't to achieve more in her field, it was to ease her psyche about feeling inferior. Which is why she wants everyone to call her the title now.

Even accepting that academic, non-medical "doctors" are still doctors, Jill Biden is not even that. She's not a Ph.D. She got an easy-peasy Ed.D. and she didn't even have to write a doctoral thesis. A doctoral thesis is the concluding act of obtaining a Ph.D. -- it's an original piece of academic scholarship that advances the field. Very often, a Ph.D.s doctoral thesis becomes his first published book.

So a Ph.D. is required, essentially, to write a publishable book of original scholarship to become a "doctor."

Doctoral dissertations are notoriously difficult to write -- or, at least, to finish. Ph.D. candidates will often finish six or seven years of higher learning, but then languish as they're not able to complete their serious, publishable original scholarly research thesis. A lot of Ph.D. candidates wind up calling themselves "ABD" for a number of years, which means "All But Dissertation."

So the dissertation is a significant undertaking, and one that some Ph.D. students never even complete.

So did "Doctor" Jill write such a doctoral thesis?

No, of course not. She wrote, essentially, a short high school term paper, and an error-riddled one at that.

Insisting on being called "Doctor" when you don't heal people is, among most holders of doctorates, seen as a gauche, silly, cringey ego trip. Consider "Dr." Jill Biden, who doesn't even hold a Ph.D. but rather a lesser Ed.D., something of a joke in the academic world. President-elect Joe Biden once explained that his wife sought the degree purely for status reasons: "She said, 'I was so sick of the mail coming to Sen. and Mrs. Biden. I wanted to get mail addressed to Dr. and Sen. Biden.' That's the real reason she got her doctorate," Joe Biden has said.

Mrs. Biden wanted the credential for its own sake. As for its quality, well. She got it from the University of Delaware, whose ties to her husband, its most illustrious alumnus if you don't count Joe Flacco, run so deep that it has a school of public policy named after him. That the University of Delaware would have rejected her 2006 dissertation as sloppy, poorly written, non-academic, and barely fit for a middle-school Social Studies classroom (all of which it is) when her husband had been representing its state in the U.S. Senate for more than three decades was about as likely as Tom Hagen telling Vito Corleone that his wife is a fat sow on payday. The only risk to the University of Delaware was that it might strain its collective wrist in its rush to rubber-stamp her doctoral paper. Mrs. Biden could have turned in a quarter-a**ed excuse for a magazine article written at the level of Simple English Wikipedia and been heartily congratulated by the university for her towering mastery. Which is exactly what happened.

Jill Biden's dissertation is not an addition to the sum total of human knowledge. It is not a demonstration of expertise in its specific topic or its broad field. It is a gasping, wheezing, frail little Disney forest creature that begs you to notice the effort it makes to be the thing it is imitating while failing so pathetically that any witnesses to its ineptitude must feel compelled, out of manners alone, to drag it to the nearest podium and give it a participation trophy. Which is more or less what an Ed.D. is. It's a degree that only deeply unimpressive people feel confers the honorific of "Doctor." People who are actually smart understand that being in possession of a credential is no proof of intelligence.

Kyle Smith then wrote about "Doctor" Jill's doctorate-worthy high school term paper.

She didn't have to write a Ph.D. dissertation, of course, because she was never a Ph.D. candidate. She was seeking the far-less-stringent degree of "Ed.D.," or education doctorate.

Insipid writing, typos, faulty language, weak research . . . it's all there.

To call Jill Biden's dissertation thin gruel is an insult to gruel.

...

Mrs. Biden's only original research consists of interviews with two -- that's right, two -- ex-students and a few colleagues at Delaware Technical Community College, where she used to teach, plus the results of a vacuous questionnaire she wrote that was returned by about 150 people who worked or studied there. Oh, and she also called two nearby community colleges seeking interviews about their retention rates. One of them wouldn't answer the question; the other wouldn't assign anyone to speak to her at all. >b>Telling us about this misadventure serves no academic purpose, though it does fill up four pages of her generously spaced paper. The transcripts of her group chats with campus figures and colleagues take up nearly 30 pages out of 129. The questionnaires eat up another 18 pages.

The dissertation, Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students' Needs, shimmers with the wan, term-papery feel of middle school, although in defense of today's middle schoolers, they at least know how to use spell-checking software, unlike Mrs. Biden. Her 2006 paper notes that at Delaware Tech, her then-employer, a third of students dissolve into the ether every year, and in order to pad out her micron-thin proposals, none of which have anything to support them except her beliefs and anecdotal evidence (she suggests building a student center and beefing up the "Wellness Center" while increasing counseling and mentoring services), she shovels in piles of drivel. Opinions will differ on which of her efforts is of least value, but a strong contender presents itself at the moment when she reaches over for the course catalog on her desk and quotes at length from page two of its boilerplate introduction ("The College respects and cares for students as individuals and maintains a friendly an open institution which welcomes all students and supports their aspirations for a better life"). She follows up on this meaningless prattle by reiterating it in her own insipid words: "Responding to the current social and economic morés of the new millennium, Delaware Tech's mission has adapted to meet the needs and goals of today's students."

If she means "mores" -- which maybe she doesn't, because I've never heard of mores describing economic habits, but exclusively to moral/cultural standards -- then she should know, it is not written with an accent.

I don't think that will turn out to be her worst error, unfortunately.

Biden's landfill of a paper contains potted histories of things everybody already knows, awkwardly phrased banalities ("Community colleges offer a myriad of support," "As a community college, Delaware Tech mirrors the national profile of a community college," "the unique nature of the classroom allows for a complexity of problems as well"), and childlike repetition ("This reason is one of many reasons that support the need for a campus psychologist.")

"Myriad" refers to countable nouns, not uncountable ones. It is defined as a "great number," not a "great amount." You'd say you have a great amount of an uncountable thing, not a great number of it.*

You can have a myriad of reasons not to call her "doctor." If you're referring to something uncountable, you could say you have an excess of moral objection to calling her "doctor."

"Myriad" is a word she is clearly not comfortable using, and perhaps has never used before, but think it sounds "smart."

...

The typos and other miscues begin in the second sentence of Mrs. Biden's introduction ("The needs of the student population are often undeserved [sic], resulting in a student drop-out rate of almost one third") unless you count the table of contents, in which Biden misspells the word "questionnaire." Easing into her subject, she churns through the reader's time with undisguised filler such as block quotations of her then-employer's mission statement, press-release blather ("Today, the community college not only answers the needs of transfer students but has also emerged to address the needs of career education, vocational and technical education, contract training, and community services"), and cutaways to comparable low-impact thoughts on community colleges taken from the very small stack of books she skimmed: "B.S. Hollinshead, president of a junior college in Pennsylvania, wrote that the junior college should be 'a community college meeting community needs.' (Cohen & Brawer, 2003, p. 20)." You don't say. "Dr. George F. Zook, president of the American Council on Education in 1946, echoed Hollinshead's sentiments . . ." and so on.

But she's a Real Doctor you guys. The Real Journalists of the media say so.

Etymology Fun: By the way, the second definition of myriad gives a specific definition of how great a number it is: A myriad is ten thousand.

Did you know that? I sure didn't.

From wiktionary.org:

Etymology

From French myriade, from Late Latin myriadem (accusative of myrias), from Ancient Greek (murias, "number of 10,000"), from (murios, “numberless, countless, infinite").

...

Noun

myriad (plural myriads)

(historical) Ten thousand; 10,000 [from 16th c.]
A countless number or multitude (of specified things) [from 16th c.]

Earth hosts a myriad of animals.

Usage notes
Used as an adjective (see below), 'myriad' requires neither an article before it nor a preposition after. Because of this, some consider the usage described in sense 2 above, where 'myriad' acts as part of a nominal (or noun) group (that is, "a myriad of animals"), to be tautological.

I think they mean that you don't have to -- and perhaps shouldn't -- say "a myriad animals," but can/should just say "myriad animals."

posted by Ace at 03:45 PM

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