Joseph Epstein’s Attack on Dr. Jill Biden Was an Attack on Higher Education!

 

About 40,000 Ph. D.s are given each year in the U.S., while only 337 were awarded in 1903. At the University of Georgia, a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing can submit poems instead of a dissertation. And at the University of Michigan, you can get a Ph.D. in literature without reading Shakespeare. You can get a degree in history without taking an American History course at Harvard University, Georgetown University, the University of Maryland, and many other highly regarded schools. The dumbing down continues in freefall. 

 

American universities have produced 30,000 new Ph.D.’s a year since 1969. That means there are a million to a million and a half Ph. D.s in the United States. And while I respect the Ph.D., I have met some holders that can’t give directions to the restroom. Most people assume all Ph. D.s require a lengthy dissertation; however, there are numerous universities globally that do not.

 

The assumption is made that one must have a master's before entering a Ph.D. program, but there are many universities around the world where that is not true. However, no university would advertise that they offer Ph. D.s without a master’s degree even when they do.

 

The leftist media has displayed its true colors, as if anyone deaf, dumb, and blind didn’t know them. They often ridiculed anyone with a “Dr.” title if they were not in the medical field, but there are exceptions with Dr. Jill Biden and a few of their pets. The media routinely referred to Cornel West (Ph.D.) and Maya Angelou as “Dr.” even though Angelou never had an earned doctorate, only honorary degrees. She insisted on being called “Dr.” and got away with it because she was black, female, and liberal.

 

The only way to beat that is to add lesbian, dwarf, and Muslim.   

 

Bill Walsh of the Washington Post declared in 2009. “My feeling is if you can’t heal the sick, we don’t call you doctor,” but the hypocrites at the Post have their favorites. They are very gracious to their own crowd with doctorates, but they ridiculed Dr. Sebastian Gorka, the forceful and articulate conservative and Trump confidant with a Ph.D. Did I mention that liberals are the most illogical, inconsistent, and ignorant people in the world?

 

The media do the same putdown with Dr. Ben Carson, and he is a famous surgeon; that qualifies as healing the sick. The media mavens realize that any doctorate gives some credibility to a person (whether deserved or not), but they reserve that credibility for their crowd.

 

I forgot to mention that the liberal media are sanctimonious hypocrites.

 

I have had the same experience with the title of “Dr.” but faced down talk show hosts who identified my opponent as “Dr.” Smith but me as “Mr.” Boys. At least twice on national television shows, I stopped the discussion and said, “I’m not sensitive, but if we are to continue this show, and it is “Dr.” Smith, then it is “Dr.” Boys. Or we can both be called Mr. or by our first names, but I insist on consistency. I had to work as hard on my Ph.D. as my opponent did.”

 

When Newsweek and other publications quote me or do a hit piece on me, they never add my Ph.D. or Ed.D. Never. But with their crowd, they use a different rule. The only standard liberals have is the double standard which they almost always follow. While the media usually give support for their spokesmen and denigrate those on the right, they don’t care about truth and principle in the use of titles. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a Ph.D. from Boston University, a fully accredited, respected school of higher learning. However, I don’t know of one example when any of the media revealed that King plagiarized his Ph.D. dissertation.

 

Oops, I just touched the third rail. While all informed people know that truth, it is not to be mentioned in polite company. The liberal media adhere to that unwritten rule with missionary zeal and faithfulness.

 

King stole from others all his life. The scholars of the King Papers Project confessed:  “King’s plagiarism was a general pattern evident in nearly all of his academic writings.”King’s very friendly biographer David J. Garrow, stated: “King’s academic compositions, especially at Boston University, were almost without exception little more than summary descriptions...and comparisons of other’s writings. Nonetheless, the papers almost always received desirable letter grades, strongly suggesting that King’s professors did not expect more...” Wow, from a friend!

 

King’s Ph.D. dissertation was “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,” and over half of it was stolen! King found a similar dissertation by Dr. Jack Stewart Boozer (real name), a former army chaplain and later Professor of  Religion at Emory University who had returned to Boston University to earn his Ph.D. King even copied mistakes from Boozer’s work The Place of Reason in Paul Tillich’s Concept of God!

 

When Boston University looked into the plagiarism, they wrote, “A committee of scholars at Boston University concluded yesterday that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation, completed there in the 1950s.”

Boston University provost Jon Westling accepted the panel’s recommendation that a letter be attached to King’s dissertation in the university library, noting that numerous passages lacked appropriate quotations and citations of sources.” And nothing was done except the letter in his file. Do you think Martin Luther Smith would have been treated that way? No, he would have been expelled.

 

King also stole much of his “I Have a Dream” speech from another black preacher, but the media never, never, never mentions that fact when they quote the speech.

 

King copied from others, even their mistakes, and he made plenty of his own - misspelling, subject-verb agreement, wrong word usage. A sharp high school senior at a Christian school would know better. Some of King’s papers written at Crozer Seminary and Boston University revealed his unbelief, his anti-Americanism, and his incredible shallowness and carelessness in grammar and facts. All this is documented in my e-book, Martin Luther King, Jr.: Judged by His Character Not His Color! Available on Amazon.

 

King, like other leftists, is protected and promoted by the media. He is always “Dr.” King even with his spurious Ph.D. And to show how sacrosanct he is, some of the news sites that usually publish my columns will refuse to use this one.