Jill Biden responds to attacks on her ‘fraudulent’ doctorate

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Updated on December 16, 2020

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President-elect Joe Biden and upcoming First Lady Jill Biden appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Thursday, where Jill Biden addressed recent criticisms of her use of the title “Doctor.” The attacks started with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and continued on Monday, when Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson compared her to Dr Pepper. Carlson slammed Jill Biden’s dissertation on Wednesday, calling her “illiterate.”

Last Monday, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece headed “Is There a Doctor in the White House?” “Not if You Need an MD,” a man named Joseph Epstein advised that despite her doctorate, Dr. Biden should not refer to herself as a doctor.

In the article, he referred to the future First Lady of the United States as “kiddo” and said she “should think about dropping the honorific, which feels fraudulent, even comic”

“That was such a surprise,” Biden, a career educator, remarked Thursday on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” alongside her husband, President-elect Joe Biden. “It was really the tone of it that I think that — you know, he called me kiddo.”

“And one of the things I’m most proud of is my doctorate,” she remarked. “I mean I worked so hard for it.”

In 2007, Biden earned her Doctor of Education from the University of Delaware, where she published her dissertation, Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs.

She has been an English professor at Northern Virginia Community College since 2009.

The author of the December 11 oped labeled her dissertation topic “unpromising” and compared her degree to the “honorary” degrees celebrities frequently receive.

“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,” opens the op-ed, misogyny on full display.

“Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name?”

The obnoxious essay drew significant condemnation online.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, Michelle Obama, and Hillary Clinton, among others, rallied to Jill Biden’s defense, and Jill Biden is grateful.

“Are you a woman with a doctorate? No matter your discipline, drop a picture here to show that we are here, we exist, and we won’t drop our title for any mediocre man’s comfort,” Dr. Claudia Antolini, a U.K.-based astronomer with a Ph.D. in cosmology, wrote in a tweet that drew over 5,000 comments and 63,000 likes.