Joseph Epstein is indisputably one of America’s finest essayists. He is also one of the most wide-ranging.
He writes lively and companionable reconsiderations of such major writers as Matthew Arnold, Henry James, and George Santayana. These are intellectually substantial pieces whose learning is considerable but lightly worn.
He writes occasional essays after the fashion of a Mencken, a Macaulay, or a Montaigne. And he writes brief, timely op-eds whose hallmarks are humor, moral insight, and quiet humanity.
Joe Epstein is sometimes decorously polemical. He is always entertaining.
Epstein is no stranger to controversy. He has, in the course of a long career, often attracted the ire of the politically correct establishment. Dyspeptic feminists, especially, exhibit an allergy to his writing, as do other scolds, churls, and campaigners for causes—anyone, in short, more generously endowed with a sense of his or her own election than a sense of humor.
Although he is the recipient of many awards and honors, Epstein’s trespasses against the brittle carapace of sisterhood have not proceeded without cost to him professionally.
It was one such foray, for example, that ended his editorship of The American Scholar (1975–97), a literary quarterly that flourished greatly under his guidance but that has since declined into a backwater of unread and unreadable bulletins from the babbling fount of inveterate self-congratulation.
Epstein’s latest’s transgression appeared last weekend in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. It’s a light-hearted op-ed called “Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not if You Need an M.D.”
In it, Epstein pokes gentle fun at Jill Biden, who on Jan. 20, 2021, is slated to become first lady of the United States.
He also offers her some sound advice. Some 15 years ago, Mrs. Biden took an Ed.D. degree at the University of Delaware with a dissertation on—wait for it!—“Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs.”
Apparently, Biden likes to call herself “Dr. Biden,” a proclivity that Epstein says “sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.” She should, Epstein advised, drop the title, if for no other reason than it communicates less honor than affectation and social insecurity.
In the United States, anyway, it is generally understood, though seldom mentioned in polite society, that the less distinguished one’s academic institution, the more likely one will insist upon the honorific “Dr.”
And that’s for doctorate degrees. The degree of Ed.D.—officially a “doctor of education”—is, let’s be candid, more a certificate than a degree. Yes, one is entitled to the title “Dr.”
But it’s only a short step, or half step, up from those entertainers and purveyors of boutique soaps who style themselves “Dr.” or “Doc”: “Dr. Bronner,” for example, or “Doc Watson” (not to mention, as Tucker Carlson wickedly reminded us, “Dr Pepper”).
In this country, in most situations, “Dr.” is an honorific properly reserved for medical doctors. We understand that there are notable exceptions—“Dr. Henry A. Kissinger” comes to mind—but exceptions do not make the rule.
Sending a Message
But neither Team Biden nor the “woke” establishment that embraces the Bidens appreciated the effort.Indeed, their response was swift, irate, and uncompromising.
In a robust response to the response, Paul A. Gigot, the editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, described the tsunami of complaint that Epstein’s article elicited.
It started slowly, he noted, but quickly grew to “a flood of media and Twitter criticism, including demands that I retract the piece, apologize personally to Mrs. Biden, ban Mr. Epstein for all time, and resign and think upon my sins.” Clearly, he concluded, the outcry was a calculated “political strategy.”
Michael LaRosa, Biden’s press secretary, sounded the gong of feminist outrage.
“If you had any respect for women at all,” he wailed in a tweet, “you would remove this repugnant display of chauvinism from your paper and apologize to her.”
That imprecation was still reverberating when Doug Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris, assured the world that “Dr. Biden earned her degrees through hard work and pure grit.”
I suspect that Gigot is correct.
“My guess,” he said, “is that the Biden team concluded it was a chance to use the big gun of identity politics to send a message to critics as it prepares to take power. There’s nothing like playing the race or gender card to stifle criticism.”
No, indeed, there isn’t. And Northwestern University, the institution at which Epstein taught for many years, got the memo.
A communiqué from the English department came wrapped up in snotty academic presumption just in time for the holidays.
An official university bulletin expanded on this theme of credentialism.
“Joseph Epstein was never a tenured professor at Northwestern [er, so what?] and has not been a lecturer here since 2002.”
Then comes one of our favorite wheezes, asserting your commitment to something you actually despise and reject: “While we firmly support academic freedom and freedom of expression [sure you do], we do not agree with Mr. Epstein’s opinion and believe the designation of doctor is well deserved by anyone who has earned a Ph.D., an Ed.D., or an M.D.”
WaPo Sniffed
If Epstein were being misogynistic in pointing out a home truth to Jill Biden, was The Washington Post engaging in xenophobia when it made fun of the foreign-born Hungarian American commentator and Trump supporter Sebastian Gorka for identifying himself as “Dr. Gorka?” He “likes to be called ‘Dr. Gorka,’” WaPo sniffed in 2017. But “he gets his way only in conservative media.”And what about Ben Carson? The current secretary of HUD is also the former director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, that is, a real doctor. Yet The New York Times regularly identifies him as “Mr. Carson,” even as it lovingly refers to Jill Biden as “Dr.” Is that racist, or is it merely intolerant woke leftism in action?
As the author and commentator Glenn Reynolds sharply observed, “It’s good to see the weight of our journalistic and academic establishments being brought to bear to protect the self-esteem of a rich, powerful white woman.”
In an American context, Melania Trump is a genuine exotic. She hails from a small country in the Balkans, is fluent in half a dozen languages, and has devoted herself with what Mr. Har—er, Emhoff—might call “hard work and pure grit” to achieve success far from the coddled purlieus of government sinecure.
Totalitarian Enterprise
After the electors met to cast their votes for him, Joe Biden once again made a plea for unity. “Now it’s time to turn the page ... to unite and to heal,” he said. We applaud that sentiment. But we wonder what he means by “unite” and “heal.”To judge by the actions of the institutions supporting his cause in this sorry episode, “turning the page” might just be euphemism for sweeping everything and everyone out of step with his program into the oubliette.
It is very rare that Gigot responds in print to criticism of what appears on his pages.
Doubtless this is because he understands that criticism is a natural part of the metabolism of opinion journalism.
In the normal course of our political life, it isn’t only expected but salutary. People have different points of view about contentious issues. A respectful airing of those differences is or should be part of the lifeblood of democracy.
If Gigot stepped into print over this contretemps, it wasn’t so much to defend Epstein or even to respond to the chihuahua-like yapping of his interlocutors. It was to sound an alarm against that “big gun of identity politics” he found operating in the background.
The governing strategy of identity politics isn’t to encourage free expression but to shutter it. In essence, it is a totalitarian enterprise, deploying the shibboleths of race, gender, and radical egalitarianism to enforce a stultifying conformity.
It is heartening to see Gigot affirming that, at one of our nation’s most important newspapers, “these pages aren’t going to stop publishing provocative essays merely because they offend the new administration or the political censors in the media and academe.”
If, as I suspect, the preview we just witnessed was a sort of sighting shot, it suggests that Gigot is going to have his hands full dealing with ever more intolerant efforts to “turn the page” and enforce ghastly new modes of “healing” and “unity.”
