Op-ed showed a disdain for education
Lola Burnham, one of my favorite journalism professors from my four years at Eastern Illinois University, wasn’t the first person to share her righteous indignation over The Wall Street Journal’s Dr. Jill Biden op-ed. And she won’t be the last.
But Burnham raised some crucial points about the piece that shouldn’t be glossed over before we move along from this particular absurdity.
First, in case you missed it, Joseph Epstein wrote an opinion piece headlined, “Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not if You Need an M.D.”
This was the lead: “Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name? ‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.”
(Addressing the soonto-be first lady as ‘kiddo,’ on the other hand, connotes solemnity and rigor.)
“Your degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title ‘Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs,’ ” Epstein continued. “A wise man once said that no one should call himself ‘Dr.’ unless he has delivered a child. Think about it, Dr. Jill, and forthwith drop the doc.”
(Dr. Jill! Such artful condescension! Such an economy of words!)
The Wall Street Journal
published the thing Dec. 11. An enormous chunk of the reading public trashed it on social media all weekend. Northwestern University quickly released a statement distancing itself from Epstein, who was a lecturer there from 1974 until 2003.
And Burnham, my beloved prof, wrote the following on Facebook.
“I was 57 when I earned my Ph.D., and, yes, I *earned* it. I earned it while I was working fulltime, with children still at home when I started, dealing with fallout from a disastrous broken leg and ankle. My ex-husband left in the middle of my first semester of grad school. My youngest daughter graduated from college
the week before I walked across the commencement stage with my mother in the audience. My mom was the only reason I finished, and then she died a little over a month later. So, yes, I earned it with late nights, all-nighters, sometimes scary drives on long commutes, too little sleep, no free time, etc. I earned it with the guilt I feel thinking I could have spent more time with my mother if I had given up on the degree. But she wanted me to get that degree. So I did.”
Burnham commuted three hours each way from Charleston, Illinois, to Carbondale to earn her Ph.D. at Southern Illinois University.
“Dr. Biden was 55 when she got her degree,” Burn
ham told me when I called to talk to her about her post. “I know what she went through. And for somebody to sneer at that just really rubbed me the wrong way.”
Burnham is the director of student publications at Eastern and the editorial adviser for The Daily Eastern News, the fiveday-a-week student newspaper. Some students call her Lola. Some call her Dr. Burnham. She’s not particular.
But chiding Biden, a lifelong education champion, about her honorific — on the esteemed and far-reaching pages of The Wall Street Journal — smacks of an anti-intellectualism that Burnham can’t abide.
“In America, we have this strange need to tear down people who have put in the effort to delve into and specialize in an academic field, to make themselves expert by their intense study,” she wrote on Facebook. “We celebrate athletes who rise to the top of their game. We celebrate actors who win awards. And we just love rich people whose only accomplishment was to inherit wealth. ... But as a society we seem to have nothing but scorn for people who make reading, observing, studying, experimenting, and, yes, thinking, the focus of their professional lives. These days, a huge chunk of our society even scorns those with medical degrees and advanced degrees in the sciences. But we seem to reserve special scorn for those who try to pass on their knowledge of and enthusiasm for a subject to their students, to try to light a spark in them so that they will maybe think a little more deeply about and be a little more aware of the world around them.”
The scorn isn’t new, Burnham said, but it feels louder lately.
She hears it when her microbiology colleagues are attacked for sharing scientific guidance on social media. She hears it in the widespread contempt for teachers at all levels, particularly those forced by a pandemic to teach online.
“There is this real thing where you devote your life to a field of study and people look down on you for that,” Burnham said.
The Wall Street Journal’s opinion editor, Paul A. Gigot, wrote a defense of Epstein’s op-ed, waving away its critics as mere pawns in an identity politics-driven campaign orchestrated by Joe Biden. “There’s nothing like playing the race or gender card to stifle criticism,” Gigot wrote.
Burnham’s post reveals the fallacy in both Epstein’s essay and Gigot’s defense. Sure it was pandering and dismissive in both intent and execution.
But what really rankled a lot of us wasn’t just the cloying style. It was the utter disdain for education and educators, expertise and experts, in a time when such commodities couldn’t be more precious.