You call him Dr. Jones, doll...

Northwestern University has distanced itself from its former lecturer Joseph Epstein who, in an article published by the Wall Street Journal, criticised the incoming first lady for using the title Dr when she is not a medical professional.

Epstein’s article has met with a backlash after he said the use of the title by Dr Jill Biden, who has a doctorate in education, “sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic”.

Northwestern has now scrubbed Epstein’s page from its website, where he was previously listed as an emeritus lecturer of English.

In a statement, the university said that it is “firmly committed to equity, diversity and inclusion, and strongly disagrees with Epstein's misogynistic views.”

In fairness, an Ed.D. is not a Ph.D., which requires a dissertation that typically takes several years to complete. The Ed.D. dissertation at the University of Delaware is an “Executive Position Paper,” which “identifies a problem of significance to you and your organization, analyzes the problem thoroughly, and develops a feasible plan to solve the problem.” If you spend seven years writing it, you are doing it wrong. Biden’s is 129 pages, including table of contents and footnotes. Many Ph.D. dissertations (ones made of words rather than numbers, anyway) are twice that long. Education schools are a frequent target of the types of writers who show up on the Journal’s editorial page, perhaps because of their role as incubators of wokeness. Maybe Epstein disdains Biden’s field. If that is the case, I wish he had said so, and made his case directly rather than boorishly impugning the first first lady to hold a research doctorate of any kind.

Many have noted that the senior Trump administration national-security official Sebastian Gorka goes by “Dr. Gorka,” because he somehow earned a Ph.D. from Corvinus University in Hungary, without raising the ire of the Journal. I have read his dissertation and other writings, and I do not think much of them. But he is Dr. Gorka—and if I had my way, he would be required to call himself “Dr.” Better that he be made to own the title. If I earned a Ph.D. by writing a dissertation like his, I would want to hide the degree rather than publicize it, and on my business card it would be a source of recurring cringe to me and others. (“Doctors” whose scholarship is risible tend to be particularly attached to the title, and to wield it because they think it provides the gravitas that their intellects do not.)

If Jill Biden wants to flaunt her Ed.D., who is Joseph Epstein to object? Those letters mean only what they mean. They certainly aren’t more embarrassing than other titles that people use in perpetuity. Ambassadors, I find, tend to call themselves “Ambassador” forever, even if they bought their sole ambassadorship by bundling political donations in Long Island, and the ambassadorship was a year on some speck of an island in a forgotten sea. Roald Dahl mocked people like this in his memoir about boarding school, where one of the cruelest teachers called himself “Captain Hardcastle.” “Even small insects like us knew that ‘captain’ was not a very exalted rank,” Dahl wrote, “and only a man with little else to boast about would cling to it in civilian life.”

In the end, instead of moral outrage, media outlets should perhaps use this moment to reflect back on their own editorial policies and histories. Those that today decry the Journal might wish to ask whether their own policies are in need of updating when they saw nothing wrong just a few months ago relegating Biden to merely being the candidate’s “wife.”