No matter how many words one muted on Twitter this past weekend — “Epstein,” “Ph.D.,” “doctor,” “Jill Biden” — the outrage kept coming. Joseph Epstein, longtime editor of The American Scholar and an essayist whose fair prominence belies Twitter’s evident lack of familiarity with his work, published an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal belittling Jill Biden’s scholarly accomplishments using repulsive, demeaning language.
Biden is an accomplished professor with a doctorate in education. For many academics, especially women, her career path is particularly inspiring: She didn’t go straight to graduate school from college, and she didn’t receive her doctorate until she was 55. For many women, this is relatable; women often defer graduate-school ambitions until family needs stabilize. It only enhances Biden’s standing that she teaches at the community-college level, since these institutions have arguably done more to welcome women and people of color into the world of higher education than four-year schools.
So academic Twitter’s outrage, especially among women, is understandable. Some of us have had “Dr.” or “Professor” in our bios or handles since the last time this disrespect went around. But even though I have a doctorate in history (Rutgers–New Brunswick, 2012) and note it in my Twitter bio, I don’t use “doctor” or “Ph.D.” professionally. You have my permission to show me respect without referring to my credential.
I have a job that depends heavily on the fortunes of higher education, but I haven’t worked in academe for several years now, and I much prefer it that way. Contrary to what one might have expected, I have found that the further away from higher education I’ve gotten, the more respect for my degree colleagues have shown. It may be that employers generally don’t want Ph.D.s, but that hasn’t been my experience.
Where I have encountered most disrespect for my doctorate is actually from academics. It’s not just that all Ph.D.s are not created equal — some schools still dominate hiring and will continue to do so as the academic-job market shrinks. It’s also that, if you’re a Ph.D. who’s left the academy, you might find yourself listed as “unemployed” on a departmental website even when you’ve gotten your dream job (as an acquaintance of mine did).
Hierarchy is real. Collegiality is a requirement. Deference is its intuitive, silent servant.
Epstein writes, in an attempt at wry humor, about the decline of the Ph.D. from the days when secretaries held glasses of water at the ready outside of oral-exam rooms, just in case someone fainted. You don’t need a Ph.D. in literature to detect the condescension to women and university staff here. But the fetishization of hazing hasn’t disappeared from inside academe. Epstein wants the fairyland of open hierarchy back, explicitly; he notes in frustration that grad students now call their professors by their first names.
Having taken two giant steps away from academe, I can now see that this hierarchy is alive and fierce as ever, and only reinforced by the beguiling informality that (for example) lets grad students and professors call each other by their first names. Once you have a Ph.D., though, you learn the lessons of academic hierarchy all over again. What’s called “collegiality” is actually deference, a willingness to get along by going along, to put up with corridor microaggressions, to smile through Professor X’s department-meeting BS — but like a whack-a-mole, there’s always another Professor X. The rules of deference are unwritten because most of them would probably be illegal. “Wait until you get tenure” is not in the faculty handbook.
And that’s if you’re ladder faculty! The burden of deference in the guise of faux collegiality falls most heavily on adjuncts, visiting assistant professors, and postdocs. If contingent faculty members do well (whether through publications or positive reviews from students), they can be ignored; if they mess up, they may not have their contracts renewed, or they may get a desultory letter of recommendation for the next round of applications. For years, adjuncts with Ph.D.s have pointed out that the structural inequities of the modern university impose a pathological invisibility on them. Hierarchy is real. Collegiality is a requirement. Deference is its intuitive, silent servant.
The demands for deference speak to gatekeeping and a general clubbiness that is hard to penetrate without a background that includes close proximity to upper-middle-class white people. That’s certainly alive in my profession, too. But with a little distance, it occurs to me that one reason the response to Epstein’s demand for deference from Jill Biden (“kiddo”) was so intense is that, as an external observer, he is a safe target. It is not, in fact, safe for women and people of color to respond in kind to those who have soft power over them and their careers in academe. Is it any wonder that so many academics responded to Epstein’s disrespect by insisting on respect for the credential they — and Jill Biden — have rightly earned?
