When does a person get to use the title “Doctor” in front of their name? Easy–When she or he has earned it.
According to the gospel accounts, Jesus had little regard for traditional honorifics, titles, or the ways in which we construct human pecking orders. He criticized the Pharisees for their concern about externals rather than the heart, promised that in the kingdom of heaven “the last shall be first,” and criticized his disciples as they jockeyed for position in his inner circle and competed in order to establish who was Jesus’ favorite. I get all that. But let me tell you a story.
At the center of the substantial core curriculum at my college, where I have taught for the last twenty-seven years, is a four-semester-long interdisciplinary course required of all freshmen and sophomores. The course is team-taught by professors from four different departments. I was the director of this program for four years; one of my many tasks was to observe new junior faculty in the classroom. One of these brand-new colleagues came to the college as a newly-minted PhD in history.
At this time my colleague was hired, I was the director of the interdisciplinary program I described in the previous paragraph. One of my many regular duties as program director was to observe junior, untenured faculty in the classroom, serving as one of a number of mentors to help guide and orient new colleagues to our college and students. Ten minutes into my first observation of my new colleague in class, I knew we had a teaching superstar on our hands. One of the few perks of running this large program was that, as director, I got to form the teaching teams for the twenty or more classes each semester. After being blown away by my colleague’s class, I promised myself that before my tenure as program director was over a couple of years down the line, I would put my colleague on a team with me.
During the fall semester of my final year directing the program, I did just that. Susan and I were a two-person team with sixty-seven brand new freshmen (I have changed her name for obvious reasons), with Susan covering history and literature, while I took care of philosophy and theology. It was undoubtedly the most memorable team-teaching experience of my twenty-plus years teaching in the program. I learned so much, both in content and style, from Susan—our end of the year student reviews were off the charts.
But there were a few speed bumps in the opening weeks of the semester. It quickly became clear that many of the students, although they connected quickly with Susan both in lecture and seminar settings, were convinced that I—the older guy with a ponytail—was the professor and that Susan was . . . well, they weren’t exactly sure about Susan’s status. She reported that some students thought she was my assistant, maybe my secretary, or maybe a graduate student in history picking up some extra money as an adjunct faculty member. Susan reported that a couple of students had even referred to her as “Mrs. Morgan.”
To be fair, Susan is young enough (barely) to be my daughter, and looks even younger than that. But the real problem, revealed over several weeks, is that some students were not aware that a woman could earn a Ph.D. and be as fully qualified as a professor in her field as a man can be in his. No one had any difficulty referring to me as “Dr. Morgan,” but they weren’t sure what to call Susan. “Professor,” maybe, but “Doctor’? Who knew that women could do that? Susan and I worked deliberately and consistently over those few weeks to update the files of many of our students—something that would be helpful for millions of our fellow citizens, as it turns out.
I was reminded of this story from a few years ago when The Wall Street Journal published an OpEd last weekend calling for Dr. Jill Biden, soon to be First Lady of the United States, to drop the “Doctor” business when she and her husband move into the White House (I won’t dignify the OpEd or the WSJ by naming the author or providing a link). After all, she’s not really a doctor, right? She can’t cure cancer or prescribe medications, for God’s sake. To make it worse, she’s only an Ed.D,, not a Ph.D. Drop the pretensions, “kiddo” (yes he really wrote that, and yes the WSJ actually printed it). Stop acting like you are special, and particularly stop acting like you are smarter and/or better than the rest of us (even though she almost certainly is on both counts).
Not surprisingly, this OpEd set off a firestorm on social media. Two years ago on this blog, during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, I wrote about the disrespect shown to Christine Blasey Ford by several media outlets (including NPR) when they refused to call her “Doctor” because she is not a medical doctor (she has an earned Doctorate in Educational Psychology).
As you might expect, this is a touchy subject with those of us who have earned doctorates. But in that particular essay, I focused only on the disrespect shown Dr. Ford by refusing to call her by the title that she spent many years and many, many dollars pursuing and achieving, something that non-medical Doctors face all the time, regardless of their gender. I did not even raise in that essay the additional (and perhaps more important) possibility that this disrespect was also energized by her being a woman.
Would Christine Blasey Ford have been called “Doctor” if she was a man? I don’t know (I’ve often been told that, although I have an earned Ph.D., that I should not call myself “Doctor” or be upset if others don’t, even in relevant circumstances). But I have no doubt that Dr. Ford’s gender made it easier for many not to refer to her by the title that she has earned. Fast forward two years to now. I also have no doubt that an OpEd such as the one in the WSJ would not have been written about a man. One of the best immediate results of the WSJ OpEd is that women with earned doctorates across the country have added “Dr.” and other earned titles to their social media tags, often to the consternation of mansplaining guys in subsequent discussion threads. I love it.
I have a very simple suggestion, one that cuts across both misogyny and a false sense of equality, across both gender discrimination and the peculiarly American resistance to excellence and expertise that raises one above the crowd. If a person earns a doctorate (M.D., Ph.D., Ed.D., and so on), it is that person’s choice as to whether to use the prefix “Doctor.” No one else, earned doctorate or otherwise, gets to tell that person in what ways they are allowed or not allowed to behave with regard to the title that they have earned. In short, and to make it personal, I don’t care if you want the word “Doctor” to apply only to medical doctors. The title “Doctor” existed long before it was applied to physicians. If you find that confusing, so be it. Jill Biden isn’t merely “calling herself” a Doctor. She is one. Deal with it, and be thankful that a top-drawer educator–one who will continue to teach as First Lady of the United States–is in the house.
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