Before going on with this essay, note that I've previously posted on this topic here. I think it's well-stated and comprehensive; I won't rewrite it in detail here; I'll simply expand on certain related points.
I earned an academic doctorate, requiring original research, called a PhD; this is generally required for the start of a conventional academic career as a professor. The kerfuffle involves FLOTUS Jill Biden using the title; she holds an EdD, a professional doctorate, somewhat lower on the academic food chain. The discipline is more practically oriented, and thesis demands, if any, are more limited in scope, e.g., a case study (limited generalizability), often involving candidate connections (like a current or a former employer). I mentioned a former co-worker who held a DBA (not related to the acronym of my profession as a database administrator, but think of an upgrade to an MBA); he was a former Marine who wrote up a sponsored project on officer leadership style. I also have not read Biden's paper (I've seen a critical secondary source on it) She did a project on community college retention. using a prior employer and other Delaware connections.
Now here's a key point that I'll subsequently return to subsequently in this discussion of "doctor": what Ms. Biden taught and worked with was not related to what she did working in a community college; she was not involved in community college admissions but as I understand teaching English (I'm not sure of the context, e.g., bilingual instruction, etc., and/or conventional English/literature courses). I'm sure there are research topics on relevant techniques, tools and measures, subject matter competencies, etc.; there are PhD programs in education and reference disciplines like English or foreign languages. Would I hire Jill Biden, say to train future primary school teachers involved in phonics and reading or junior or high school English teachers? No.
Ironically, I have some exposure to Biden's thesis topic; in 2008, I worked for a university ERP software publisher. One of our clients was a Long Island community college, NCC. I had to deal with a lot of crap on-site; for example, I had to train technical staff in use of an ODS (data store) dashboard. One key trainee literally had a narcolepsy problem and also constantly got paged out of training; he would later lie to my employer I hadn't set up his account. But where I ran into Biden's issue was that NCC had the policy of keeping past students not graduated perpetually enrolled every semester since their first course. So, say the student took a class on basketweaving in 1982, and never took another class in the interim; our software would automatically generate enrollment records for unexpired students, even in 2008. And basically, this space requirement would suck up storage over time. So don't take these numbers literally; they are simplified to make the point. I discovered the state system administrators weren't backing up the 28 GB database. (We DBA's are anal-retentive about backups.) Dealing with government bureaucrats is a pain; they end up telling me, "We're only going to give you 24 GB to store your backup. Shrink your database to make it fit your allocated backup space." That wasn't an option; I had no control over product design. The last I heard, NCC was looking to expire sparsely enrolled students. Welcome to my world.
So, briefly returning to the 3 examples of professional doctorates, my former Marine colleague earned s DBA (vs. PhD, not to be confused with the professional role of a database administrator): think of it as an upgrade of an MBA, a degree I also hold). In an analogous fashion, one can think of the EdD as an upgrade of an MEd.
Biden's alma mater, the University of Delaware, offers and publishes a comparison of both doctoral degrees
Now the "Dr. Biden" kerfuffle is one of those constantly recurring partisan trends on Twitter like on Ashli Babbitt, who leftists constantly term a "domestic terrorist". I think it irritates the center-right which is probably why the left obsessively repeats it, yanking the chains of conservatives.
I think what triggered it last week is former Fox/NBC host, now podcaster Megyn Kelly representing the common right-wing take of saying "stop calling her Dr., she's not an MD". That's another take which I'll discuss later. What did irritate me was where hundreds of leftists falsely asserted Biden held a PhD. I got a friendly reply tweet this weekend saying effectively, "You're absolutely correct, but the vast majority aren't interested in academic nuances, and you're swimming against the tide."
I wince when I hear Biden or her surrogates use the title for reasons I'll shortly discuss, but it's more a case of bad judgment. I don't have an issue with Mrs. Biden striving to improve herself and earned an advanced degree; I respect that. I have a little sister with an elementary education who, after raising 6 kids, earned a Master's in library science and restarted her professional career. I respect Biden teaching community college kids.
So Megyn Kelly probably got hit by one of the most effective counterattacks I've ever seen on Twitter. It turns out her own dad, who taught at SUNY/Albany, was an EdD and almost surely got addressed as "Dr" by his students. I know I did insist on it. I remember one student kept insisting on calling me "Ron". I kept repeating 5 or 6 times "Dr. Guillemette". He finally spat out "Dr. Guillemette". I wasn't there as a student's pal; I have a different role and responsibility. I also believe in treating all students equally, not playing favorites. There were a few faculty at the time who encouraged their students to call them by their given name, so that the rest of us were stuck up. It cost the rest of us a measure of respect and discipline in the classroom. It's sort of like calling one's parents 'Mom' and 'Dad'. I've never used their given names, to this day, unless I was introducing them to others. For similar reasons, to this day I will not call my former dissertation chair, Dr. Scamell, 'Richard'. Now in personal conversations with other faculty, I'll use given names, but not in front of students. And I don't have a problem with FLOTUS insisting on her students use the title in her classroom or on campus. or, say, if she were giving a talk on her area of expertise, like college retention. Similarly, my late maternal uncle, a priest/pastor was Uncle Roger or otherwise 'Father [surname]' or 'Father Roger'.
Socially, I'm less likely to insist on the use of the title. I think the UH Alumni Association used my MBA degree in mailings, i.e., Ronald Guillemette, MBA instead of 'Dr.' or '..., PhD' and so I queried why they were using the first degree, and the response was that similar others thought the MBA title was more prestigious. Nope. To this day, they now respect my preference. My insurance company apparently learned I hold a PhD a few years back and have used it since. I still have a sister-in-law who uses it in mailing holiday or birthday cards. Generally, it's nice when others acknowledge it socially, but I don't insist on it. I worked my ass off earning thar degree; I remember taking a tough QMS research design course, being one of 2 A's in the course; most doctoral students took an easier psychology version. I supported myself as a teaching fellow, a couple of class sections a semester for a few hundred dollars a month. I went through 2 days of writing my major comprehensive exam (no hints, "you'll do fine"), then my minor (accounting) comp, and my oral comp. I remember I celebrated finishing a comp by going to a dollar cinema and indulging in popcorn and soft drink. Then there was the 14-month process of planning, executing, and writing a few hundred pages of the dissertation doing interviews, collecting data and performing sophisticated statistical analysis. I ordered other dissertations to read through interlibrary loan. read literally thousands of research articles in reference disciplines like applied psychology, education, and psychometrics. And, of course, there was the dissertation defense. (When your committee signs off on your dissertation; you are a PhD, not the pomp and circumstance of graduation.) No joke, I remember writing a subsequent related research article and the editor wrote back an acceptance, provided I cut my 400-odd references in half. I'm anal-retentive about crediting other researchers, worrying about others reading my work and wondering why I didn't cite their work. So, as Barbara Boxer would observe, yes, I earned that title.
When my academic career imploded in the early 1990's (I was on a nonrenewable visiting professor appointment at Illinois State in the middle of a recession and no job offers), I had a difficult time going back to professional IT; IT recruiters didn't want to recruit someone who they suspected would use them to ride out the recession and then jump back into academia taking their training dollars with me. They had a dim view of "ivory tower" academics able to cope in the real world of IT. They dismissed academic computing experience as irrelevant and considered my prior professional IT skills during my 8-year hiatus as suspect. What does this have to do with the topic? Well, I was privately advised to lose the PhD from my resume. I was like "how the hell do I explain away an 8-year gap?" I won't say I dropped it, but for the most part I buried it, at least for the first few years; it was never really discussed during interviews. Occasionally others, particularly Indian recruiters, noticed. I think there's a high emphasis on education in south Asian culture. I remember my closest friend at NASA (pre-UH) was an engineer from Bangladesh. He told me his family disowned him for stopping with his MS degree in a family where every other member had a PhD or MD. One supervisor discovered it about 4 years back, calling me 'Dr. Ron', and my colleagues did the same; I found it charming.
Before continuing, let me point out that I don't really push my 4 college degrees, including the PhD, on social media or the blog. I make a passing reference to being a former professor; I do have some online resumes, and search engines will uncover my academic job history, my dissertation title, etc. I also published a few relevant tweets. I have a listing of my articles (from my academic CV) on a blog webpage (see the hub link above).
I think that many holders of professional doctorates want the prestige that goes with an academic doctorate, and most lay people don't understand the distinction (like I referenced earlier). I remember the former Marine was extremely sensitive and obsessed about the distinction; I had never heard of the college he got the degree from, and I had never heard of a DBA degree, so I had to do a Google search. I wasn't bringing it up--he was in group meetings, thinking I was dissing him. I haven't been in a DBA program, so I can't compare and contrast. But I was on the PhD faculty at UWM, contributed questions for comprehensive exams and graded them, have been a peer reviewer on journal and proceeding articles, etc. If you want to impress me, do original research and publish it in a competitive journal. Dr. Scamell didn't suggest my dissertation topic; he was more of an editor and reviewer. I offered to put his name on my related papers, a common professional courtesy. He rejected the idea, saying he hadn't earned the favor. A fundamentally decent man; he once told us if he hadn't become a professor, he would have become a minister. (I've mentioned elsewhere I started college with the intent of becoming a Catholic priest.)
Now on a social level, I don't push my title on my blog or my social media accounts. In part, I don't want others to confuse my political opinions with my academic credentials. I do offer evidence for my points of view, but I'm not an epidemiologist when it comes to discuss COVID-19 and vaccines. I do understand empirical research design and statistics, the limitations of reported results, etc. Now if we start discussing behavioral issues in the use of IT. I'm more assertive in discussing my credentials.
I've noticed some people putting credentials in their Twitter name, their Microsoft Teams account, etc. and my immediate reaction is: "My, aren't we special?". In my daily miscellany posts, I've often cited or clipped sources like Brion McClanahan, Tom Woods, Tom DiLorenzo, Nick Gillespie and others have earned PhD's, will occasionally discuss their credentials in passing, but don't make an argument by appealing to authority like, "I'm a PhD, and you're not." Believe me, we've seen pettiness in academia just as in real life. Let me give an example to make my point. I found mistakes in measures of computer user satisfaction and applied psychometrics in general. I wanted to publish a note opening the discussion on issues I discovered doing my own research. Believe me, it would be easier to support my own approach based on precedence. But I found oddball arguments in prestigious articles that I had never heard in the psychology discipline. So, the article got rejected with personal insults of the nature, "Instead of bitching about other people's work, why don't you devise and validate a measure of your own?" A legitimate future question, but my points were: hey, people are using this measure, and the emperor is wearing no clothes; no one is mentioning my criticisms. When I dreamed of a career as a professor as an undergraduate, I had this Leibnizian notion of 'Come, let us calculate [our differences]' in academia,,,
During the recent Biden kerfuffle, I responded to some PhD (yes, in her Twitter name), pointing out that both she and Biden held "academic doctorates" from the University of Delaware. I replied to the tweet, pointing out from one real PhD to another, Biden's doctorate was professional and by the way, it's bad form to put your credentials in your Twitter name. She personally replied back, conceding the first point, but apparently, she got triggered by the second point, implying, "He's just messing with me, right?" Another Barbara Boxer "I earned that title" type.
Finally, a Wikipedia article does a good job summarizing use of the title:
Doctor is an academic title that originates from the Latin word of the same spelling and meaning.[1] The word is originally an agentive noun of the Latin verb docēre [dɔˈkeːrɛ] 'to teach'. It has been used as an academic title in Europe since the 13th century, when the first doctorates were awarded at the University of Bologna and the University of Paris.
Having become established in European universities, this usage spread around the world. Contracted "Dr" or "Dr.", it is used as a designation for a person who has obtained a doctorate (commonly a PhD/DPhil). In many parts of the world it is also used by medical practitioners, regardless of whether they hold a doctoral-level degree.
The earliest doctoral degrees (theology, law, and medicine) reflected the historical separation of all university study into these three fields. Over time the Doctor of Divinity has gradually become less common and studies outside theology, law, and medicine have become more common (such studies were then called "philosophy", but are now classified as sciences and humanities – however this usage survives in the degree of Doctor of Philosophy).
Throughout much of the academic world, the term Doctor refers to someone who has earned a doctoral degree (highest degree) from a university. This is normally the Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated PhD (sometimes Ph.D. in North America) from the Latin Philosophiae Doctor or DPhil from its English name, or equivalent research doctorate
In the US it similarly became customary to use post-nominals rather than the title of Doctor when addressing letters. All those with doctoral degrees continued to use the title professionally and socially.
In many English-speaking countries, it is common to refer to physicians by the title of doctor, even when they do not hold a doctoral level qualification.
In the United States, the use of the title "Doctor" is dependent upon the setting. The title is commonly used socially by physicians and those holding doctoral degrees...Although the usage of the title by Ph.D. graduates has become common, its use socially by holders of professional doctorates (other than those noted [e,g., MD]) is neither explicitly endorsed nor explicitly discouraged by writers on etiquette.
A few comments: the article notes, without comment, the White House uses the title for Jill Biden with an EdD without comment. You have to read into context here. There would be no reason to point that out if usage with a professional doctorate if consistent with prior context. The title 'Dr.' is tied to the highest/academic/research degree; in the U. Delaware chart above, we show the target employer is a university for the PhD graduate. In academia, universities offer graduate degrees. My first alma mater, OLLU, used to use the name "College" [I think it's used on my diploma, even though I'm pretty sure they had graduate programs in education and social work at the time.]
Oddly, during the whole Twitter debate, it was an MD who pointed out "doctor" was linked to teaching, and that's not the function of an MD. The MD degree also does not require original research. There's a whole discussion over whether physicians should use the title, or simply append their MD credential.
So, some general conclusions: I think the whole common "If you're not an MD, don't use the title" is a stupid talking point, completely inconsistent with the history of title usage. Second, Biden's use of the title is misleading, non-standard and ill-advised; this is clear by literally hundreds of Biden tweeters inferring she has a PhD instead of an EdD, not knowing the difference. It's obvious from the University of Delaware's own chart, which degree is more rigorous and prestigious. I think it's admirable that Biden sought to earn an advanced degree, but I would respect her accomplishment more if she had earned a PhD. I'm not obsessed with her using the title; it's annoying, but it doesn't diminish my own achievements. But if she wants to earn my respect, she needs to do real peer-reviewed research.
