Opinion: A matter of degree
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Like most viewers of the inaugural festivities, I assumed that when Vice President Joe Biden’s wife was introduced as ‘Dr. Biden’ that she was a physician. But, as a Times story points out, her Ph.D. is in education, not medicine. The story quotes the journalist Amy Sullivan as saying that ordinarily ‘when someone goes by doctor and they are a Ph.D, not an M.D., I find it a little bit obnoxious.’
Me too, and I wouldn’t give the good ‘doctor’ the dispensation Sullivan did. Jill Biden’s insistence on the title, Sullivan mused, ‘is a reminder that she’s her own person.’ So should we call Michelle Obama ‘Dr. Obama’ because she has a J.D. -- a Juris Doctor -- from Harvard? I know some lawyers who grumble that newspapers refer to physicians, but not to lawyers, as ‘Dr.’
The real whiners are Ph.Ds, as I learned in my previous life as an editorial page editor responsible for the Letters to the Editor section. Why, I was asked, should a physician writing about traffic congestion or Iraq get initials after his signature but not the professor of English literature? The short answer is: Because we say so. And we say so because newspaper style reflects common parlance, which tends to reserve the ‘Dr.’ for people who can save your life -- or at least decide how you lost it.
I’m thinking in the latter connection of Cyril Wecht, the longtime and colorful coroner in my home town of Pittsburgh. Our editorials referred to Wecht as ‘Dr. Wecht,’ because he was an M.D. not because he was a J.D. He was, in fact, both, and to this day refers to himself as ‘Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D.’ (Our editorial cartoonist had some fun with Wecht’s credential-consciousness, drawing him sitting behind a nameplate reading: ‘Cyril Wecht, M.D., J.D., BMOC.’)
Occasionally a non-M.D. doctor will break the media’s medical monopoly; witness the references to ‘Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’ But if Jill Biden were to write a letter to most newspapers, the signature would be free of either the Dr. before her name or the Ph.D. after it -- unless, perhaps, she was writing about education.
That’s fine with me. My mother told her children that really accomplished people don’t need to flaunt their qualifications. My own experience is that there is usually an inverse relationship between the quality of someone’s credentials and his propensity to publicize them. If you’re a Big Man on Campus, you don’t care whether the nerds put letters at the end of your name.