By Joseph Epstein
Monday, January 25, 2021
The misogynist of my title, as Flaubert
said of Madame Bovary, c’est moi. I
became America’s most notable one on Saturday morning, December 12, upon the
release of an 800-or-so-word op-ed I wrote in the Wall Street Journal published under the title “Is There a Doctor in
the White House? Not If You Need an M.D.” I had written the piece to get what I
thought a minor pet peeve off my chest: the affectation of the
president-elect’s wife in calling herself, and insisting that everyone else
refer to her as, “Dr. Jill Biden.” She is not a physician; rather, she was
awarded a degree by a graduate school of education. What I thought was a fairly
light bit of prose whose intentions were chiefly comic set off a forest fire of
anger toward, abuse of, and outright hatred for its author. It proves you can
be a naïf even at the age of 83.
Nearly 5,000 readers wrote online to the Wall Street Journal to argue about my
op-ed. My name “trended,” as they say, number one on Twitter. The New York Times published a full-blown
article about it, as did the Guardian
in England. My local (that is, Chicago) press and television channels ran
stories about it. It was discussed on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, and on Stephen
Colbert’s late-night show, where Mrs. Biden deplored “the tone” and said, “One
of the things I love most is my doctorate…. I worked so hard for it.”
Meanwhile, the English Department at Northwestern University, where I taught
for 30 years, flushed me down Orwell’s memory hole by taking my name off its
website and sending out an online message disassociating itself from my
“noxious” and “misogynistic” views.
Fifty or so new reviews of my most recent
book have appeared on Amazon since December 12, nearly all of them attacks on
the book and on me personally (“Self-important, sexist, and droll.”) My entry
on Wikipedia has also been radically altered. Where before it was
straightforward and neutral, it now features me as a right-wing lout, with an
entire paragraph given over to my Wall
Street Journal op-ed. The entry suggests that my 23 years as editor of the American Scholar, where I thought I had
a fairly good run, was one of constant baiting of liberals and liberal causes
such that everyone at Phi Beta Kappa could not wait to be rid of me. These
items and others suggest that these vigilante wokesters, whose work this is,
travel in packs and like few things better than placing snakes under every rock
one is likely to turn over.
Jill Biden was defended from my dastardly
depredations by both Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. I was also chastened
by Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten. One of Martin Luther King’s
daughters chimed in, in defense of the use of “doctor” for non-physicians. Jill
Biden took what these days passes for the high road by writing that during her
husband’s administration, “we will build a world where the accomplishments of
our daughters will be celebrated, rather than diminished.” Kamala Harris’s
husband wrote on Twitter: “Dr. Biden earned her degrees through hard work and
pure grit. She is an inspiration to me, to her students, and to Americans
across this country. This story would never have been written about a man.”
Then there was the hate mail or, more
accurately, hate email. Where else but on and through the Internet can you
insult a person using the vilest possible language and not even have to go to
the expense of a postage stamp to do so? At a rough estimate, I received more
than 200 pieces of hate mail. The quality and nature of it is worthy of a bit
of attention. First, though, here is a not uncharacteristic sample from someone
named Jennifer Irwin:
A woman
who gets a doctorate in education you suggest to drop the doctor?! You petty,
pathetic, let’s be real misogynistic f—k! You shouldn’t be teaching other
humans. We need more Jill Bidens and less bitter f—king Aholes like you in the
world!
Not all my hate email was this obscene,
though I couldn’t help notice that my female antagonists went in for such
coarse language more than did the men who wrote chiefly to insult me. “You’re A
Prick” was the subject line from one Tricia Maher-Miller. “F—k you” is the
entire message from a Jamie Nestor, to whose email I responded by writing
“Gesundheit!”
Most of the insults claimed I was
envious—the phrase “degree-envy” came up more than once—of Jill Biden’s
academic attainments, that I was unfit to teach, that I was ancient and out of
it (the phrase “old fart” came up a time or two), and in general a disgrace to
the human race. While I received no death threats, quite a few of my
hate-mailers spoke of their longing for me soon to depart the planet (“Wishing
you the best of health in the last 1% of your underwhelming life”).
A number of people wrote to complain of my
referring to Mrs. Biden as “kiddo.” This I did in my first sentence: “Madame
First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small
but I think a not unimportant matter.” Anyone not blinded by anger would
recognize that this sentence was built on the notion of increased intimacy of
address. But my hate-mailers, not close readers, thought the phrase was
condescending and thereby sexist. One sent me an email consisting of the word
“kiddo” repeated perhaps a hundred times. There is of course nothing sexist or
even sex-related about the word “kiddo,” since one uses it freely to address
both men and women. Yet to the TV host Keith Olbermann on Twitter, “As the use
of ‘kiddo’ underscores, misogyny and authoritarianism are baked in @wsj; this
83-year old turd polisher’s hatred goes back to a homophobic piece in 1970; and
his degree envy is just pathetic.” But Keith, as the 46th president of the
United States might say, “look, here’s the deal, I myself use the word ‘kiddo’
all the time”—which he does, or at least did, until this brouhaha. Ah, me,
another rainy day in the Old Republic of Letters.
I also received more than a few
psychoanalyses explaining to me the reasons behind my wretched views (not
enough mother love, don’t you know). In this connection, my genitals were
sometimes mentioned, the presumption being that their inadequacy would explain
my harsh and hateful views. Many lectured me on the true meaning of the word
“doctor” and its history, lectures usually nicely larded with insults. One such
closed: “While you are free to denigrate non-medical doctoral degrees to your
malignant heart’s content, you will NOT stop the colleges and universities of
the world from conferring doctoral degrees of all types. You are just another
self-hating kvetch.” Only one piece of hate mail featured anti-Semitism. I’d
not before now been called, as I was by this charming correspondent, a man
signing himself Neil Thompson, a “kike c—t.”
Another batch featured accounts by women,
or in some cases stories about women told by their husbands, of their own
arduous acquisition of advanced degrees. Many of these letters, though their
authors seemed unaware of it, were really little more than accounts of their
own virtue—virtue, let there be no question about it, impossible that a lowlife
like me could ever hope to attain. They were written only partly to insult me,
but in greater part to exhibit their own self-congratulation. These were
examples of the virtucrat in action. The word “virtucrat,” one of my few
contributions to the English language, is “a man or woman who is certain that
his or her political views are not merely correct but deeply, morally righteous
into the bargain.”
I have, at the time of writing, had only
three phone calls from angry strangers. The first arrived at 1:25 a.m. the day
of publication of my op-ed. A man’s voice wakened me to announce, “You put me
through your article. In return I’m putting you through this phone call,”
whereupon the caller hung up. The second, also from a man, arrived at midday
and was short and snappy, if not happy: “You Joseph Epstein.” “Yes.” “You
dick.” Another hang-upper. The third came from a woman who went on a bit
longer, calling me “an old geezer” who she hoped would soon be dead. She, too,
ended the call without awaiting an answer. Not much interested in dialogue, my
telephone interlocutors.
Yeats’s famous lines, “The best lack all
conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity” have proved
only half true in my case. Alongside all this egregious email, I have also
received a good deal from people approving my WSJ op-ed and saying generous things about the pleasure my writing
generally has given them over the years. Included among them was a cheering
word from a much admired historian of America, whose name I shall not mention
lest he be tainted by my current infamy, remarking on my sense of humor and the
sad fact that “there is no room left for humor in our current culture.”
Above all, I am pleased, and more than a
little proud, of the Wall Street Journal
coming to my defense in the form of Paul Gigot, the editor in charge of the
paper’s opinion pages, writing an op-ed of his own defending my column in his
paper and cogently suggesting reasons for the tumult it has caused: “The Biden
media team elevated Mr. Epstein’s work in what was clearly a political
strategy.” Senator Tom Cotton sent me an email about my op-ed, contrasting the WSJ’s courageous stand in my defense to
the cowardice of the editors of the New
York Times in connection with the piece he published there in the summer of
2020 in which he argued for sending in troops to support police where riots had
broken out in American cities. Its publication caused the paper to fire its
editorial-page editor for allowing it to run.
All the boxes against me, then, have been
ticked: sexist, check; racist, check; homophobe, check; snob, check; elitist,
check; out-of-it old fart, check. But above all and everywhere, I was most
clearly a misogynist, a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly
prejudiced against women. I hope word of this doesn’t leak out to my wife of
nearly 45 years or to my two elegant and accomplished grown-up granddaughters.
Nor to all the women who sat in my classes at Northwestern over the years, four
of whom wrote to me in my defense, one of whom noted, “I have continued to
defend you in the comments and always will. The piece was hilarious, and no one
at NU ever went to bat for me like you did.”
On the charge of misogyny, I now have
direct experience of the fact that, under the current malevolent and humorless
reign of political correctness, anything mildly critical written or said about
any woman, African American, homosexual, or any other minority group (excluding
Jews and Asians) will automatically earn one of those condemnatory labels that
have replaced thought for so many in our day. Perhaps nowhere is this more
prevalent than in our universities and media. I gently chide Jill Biden on the
pretentiousness of her calling herself doctor, and Mika Brzesinski, on her
television show, calls me “petty, elitist, and misogynist”—the “trifecta,” as
her partner Joe Scarborough added.
My criticism of the use of the doctor
title for anyone who is not in the healing trades reminded me that the
Johnsonian scholar Donald J. Greene was opposed to people referring to Samuel
Johnson as Dr. Johnson, because the honorary doctorate from Oxford had been
bestowed upon him only after Johnson had produced his Dictionary, and Greene felt it tended to portray the man as pompous
and grumpy in a way he never was. I stand by my view that today to call oneself
“doctor” if one is not involved in physical or mental healing is generally a
comic affectation, and I see nothing in the least sexist in saying so.
As for Jill Biden’s Ed.D., many people who
acquire that degree chiefly turn out to be school superintendents. As Nicholas
Clairmont wrote at Tablet: “An Ed.D.
degree is 90 or so years old, as a concept, and it is not really comparable to
a Ph.D. It’s not a welding certificate, but it is perhaps closer to welding
than comparative literature. It’s an occupational license, the possession of
which allows teachers and education administrators to become about a third
better paid. It is a professional training certification, not a scholarly
project committed to enlarging the scope of human knowledge.” Clairmont adds
that “Jill Biden is not a Ph.D. stealing the valor of physicians. She is a
technical school student stealing the valor of Ph.Ds.”
Nor do education departments represent the
intellectual heights at any university. In 1997, my alma mater, the University
of Chicago, literally disbanded its Department of Education, founded in 1895 by
John Dewey, due to the diminution in its quality. What is usually taught in
these departments is generally a hodgepodge of sociology, political science,
conventional wisdom, and whatever else happens to be at hand. (I have not read
Jill Biden’s dissertation, but for a blistering attack on its quality, see Kyle
Smith’s “Jill Biden’s Garbage Dissertation, Explained,” National Review, December 17, 2020.) When I was in school, I took a
single education course, thinking that a teaching certificate might come in
handy if my desire to become a writer didn’t turn out. Wolfgang Pauli, the
physicist, is supposed to have said in response to a student’s far-off answer
to a question he posed, “That’s not even wrong.” The education course I took
was not even dull. I have read articles in which people have argued that a good
part of the problem with much public schooling today is owing to the offerings
in contemporary education departments. In any case, an Ed.D. is far from an
unambiguous accomplishment and may not be a degree one wishes to flaunt.
Some of my hate-mailers have asked why I
haven’t written to attack the right-wing firebrand Sebastian Gorka, who also
refers to himself as “Doctor.” I didn’t because he is not sufficiently
prominent for me to do so, though let me say here that I think his referring to
himself as Dr. Gorka a ludicrous bit of pretentiousness and pomposity. Others
have asked why I haven’t attacked Condoleezza Rice or Henry Kissinger for their
self-doctoring. Rice, best I know, does not call herself doctor; she has too
much serious learning and good sense to stoop to need to do so. Henry
Kissinger, I’m told, only took to wishing to be referred to as doctor when he
went into public life to avoid the deadly title of Professor. When I am
referred to as Professor, as I occasionally still am, I usually remark that I
much prefer to be addressed as Mister, Professor being what you call the man
who plays piano in the bordello. (“Hit it, Professor!”)
Something there is heavily Teutonic about
the nonmedical use of “Dr.” before one’s name. All this conferring of doctor
upon oneself by academics is said to have had its origin in Germany. An old
joke has a ship filled with German Jews making port at Haifa, and before the
ship unloads, someone from the deck calls out “Doktor,” at which point every
passenger rushes to the railing in response, and the ship sinks.
In America, the academic affectation of
calling oneself Dr. is more than a little motivated by the hope of garnering
some of the prestige of physicians. I had an acquaintance, a Ph.D. in
anthropology, who always phoned in his dinner reservation under the name Dr.
Newman, hoping he would get a better table and perhaps greater respect through
the title. Whoopi Goldberg, on television, cited Jill Biden as “an amazing
doctor” and thought she would make a fine surgeon general. I have had people
write to tell me that until my op-ed they thought Jill Biden a physician.
Endless are the sad jokes about academics booking flights under the title of
Dr. and then being called upon for their help when another passenger has a
heart attack. Finally, there is something snobbish, un-American even, like the
ennobling prefix von, about someone
not in medicine referring to him- or herself with an honorific doctor.
***
Could all the hubbub occasioned by my
op-ed really have been about anything so minor as calling out Jill Biden on
flaunting her degree or referring to her jokingly as kiddo? Or was something
else going on? The true theme of my op-ed, after all, is the sad state, one
might almost say the decay, of the contemporary university in America. This
devolution of higher education (always excepting science and engineering
training) has been underway for a good while.
In 2002, I published a book on the subject
of snobbery, in which I noted that where one or one’s children went to college
had become perhaps the prime source of contemporary snobbery in America. The
title of the book’s chapter on the subject is “A Son at Tufts, a Daughter at
Taffeta.” Colleges, like designer clothes, I argued, had become less about the
quality of their education than about their branding, with Harvard the Armani,
Yale the Christian Dior, and Princeton the Ferragamo of higher education; and,
like these clothes, vastly overpriced and not all that elegant, or, in the case
of our putative great universities, all that educative. The leaching since 2002
of today’s politics into much of the social science and humanities curricula,
along with the new humorless and nervous-making stringencies brought on by
political correctness, has made matters worse.
Might it be that many of the people who
wrote such vile things to me, or pronounced upon my op-ed on social media or in
actual media, were in fact offended by my pointing up the degradation of the
contemporary university? Might it be that my even partially describing this
degradation of higher education, and the subsequent devaluation of its degrees,
ordinary and honorary, on which they feel that their prestige depends offended
them more than a thousand kiddos? By mocking the state of the university, did
they feel I was attacking the foundation on which their own lives have been
built? Might R.R. Reno, writing about my op-ed in First Things, be on target when he writes: “That Epstein should
note the obvious—that credentials are the cheap cellophane in which elites wrap
themselves when they lack real achievements and nobility of soul that win
respect—galls them.”
This would suggest that my 800 words
constituted a rhetorical grenade thrown in the class war, where the status
conferred by educational degrees, like those of nobility in an earlier day, is
crucial to those who went to great expense of time and money to attain them.
All this hatred directed at me touched a nerve in their otherwise fairly empty
lives because my words hit them where they live: in their status. “I don’t
believe the butt of Epstein’s piece was women,” Nicholas Clairmont writes, “but
rather credentialism—which is the hornet’s nest one cannot kick today. Oh boy,
you do not want to piss off the people whose sense of self hangs in a frame on
their wall.”
Sad when the supposedly highly educated
are among the crudest, most fragile, and easily unhinged people in the country.
But I guess
that’s the way it is, kiddo.
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