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Jill Biden responds to attacks on her ‘fraudulent’ doctorate
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.”
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Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, Michelle Obama, and Hillary Clinton, among others, rallied to Jill Biden’s defense, and Jill Biden is grateful.
“But look at all the people who came out in support of me,” she said. “I mean, I am so grateful and I was — you know, I was just overwhelmed by how gracious people were toward me.”
Joe Biden expressed his anger with the op-ed as well, reminding Colbert about his wife’s accomplishments, “She had two master’s degrees and she kept going to school all the time while teaching at night.”
Many women rallied around the future first lady, with many adding their full titles to their names on social media.
“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.
