I see what you did there.
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Often people do some teaching as a job in addition to working on their degree, but your friendâs work with his students is not a structural component of his PhD program.
Oh, is he getting an Ed.D.? Thatâs a different thing entirely. Administrators in 4-year schools are usually drawn from people with academic degrees (eg, the PhD), but such degrees arenât pursued as a vocational credential.
Hope it helps. To 'Joy My Freedom is really a spectacular book - well written and insightful. I canât recommend it enough.
I disagree with your assertion. Iâm talking about the difference between considering someone to be hard working or intelligent and them having worked hard or shown effort at some, possibly prolonged, period of time. Associating positive traits that garner respect with a person who may have achieved a high level degree shouldnât be a foregone conclusion. There are plenty of terrible people with high level degrees whose actions negate any respect the effort of a getting the degree should theoretically earn them. There are doctors who comply with police requests to violate the sanctity of a personâs body by performing a 4th amendment violating search of their body cavities without a warrant or probable cause. Do you respect such doctors just because they got an MD? You canât reasonably dissociate the person who has the degree from the other aspects of their character and actions. I wonât show respect to a corrupt cop. I wonât thank a war criminal who kills foreign civilians for their military service. In my opinion, there are things that negate the automatic respect society allots to certain achievements or actions or career choices. By virtue of that, I choose to reserve respect for people who I can reasonably verify appear to deserve it. This doesnât mean I actively disrespect them. I strive to treat everyone neutrally and with the basic level of respect that all human beings deserve.
Thatâs exactly what Iâm saying. Itâs probably true in many cases, but using high level degree achievement as a proxy for saying someone is a hard worker or intelligent isnât a reliable way to be accurate in your assessment of people. Itâs just a positive form of prejudice. Dr. Bill Cosby has a doctorate in education. Do you respect him for the effort he put into that or is that negated in your opinion by the vile things heâs been accused of doing?
Weâre talking about respect, which isnât isolated to a single area of a personâs character or experience.
No, Iâm not saying that. Iâm saying that it shouldnât be a default assumption. It might certainly be true, but not always in every scenario.
Honorary doctorate.
Which are things that are held in absolute contempt by most real doctors. Theyâre nothing but marketing bullshit, and they devalue the credibility of the institution that grants them.
One of the factors leading to the earlier-than-originally-planned retirement of my Mumâs husband was his outrage at the fact that his university had granted an honorary doctorate to The Wiggles.
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What was the field they got the honorary doctorate in? Not being cute, I seriously want to knowâŠ
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Early childhood education.
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Makes sense, I guess. or⊠not. As you say, itâs mostly to take some of the fame of the honorary doctorate and attach it to the university.
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Yes, he had honorary degrees, but:
âAfter attending Temple University in the 1960s, he received his bachelorâs degree there in 1971. In 1973 he received a masterâs degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and in 1976 he earned his Doctor of Education degree, also from UMass. His dissertation discussed the use of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids as a teaching tool in elementary schools.â
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It sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder about people with doctorates. I mean, really, you sound pretty pissed off to me and it sounds like âHow dare they get respect?!?â
If you have a doctorate, yes, you should get respect for being educated in your field and for having put the time and work in to do it. It is a real accomplishment. Sorry if that chaps your ass.
As to your other projections about character and such, I really think youâre reaching. All a doctorate means is that youâre an expert in your field. It doesnât mean youâre an excellent human being with fine ethics and better than anyone else. Iâm not sure why you keep whipping this horse. You just sound pretty pissed off by people with high degrees lording it over everyone or something.
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Ainât nobody saying that a doctorate makes you a good person. But it does imply a well above average level of academic ability and a capacity to sustain an extreme work ethic [1].
Cosby is smart, hard-working and evil. No contradiction there.
[1] Although a humanities dissertation may require a somewhat less extreme workload than a scientific research thesis, and I suspect that a high-profile celebrity writing about his own career may have not been held to as rigorous a standard as a normal candidate. Theyâd already thrown him an honorary pass in his incomplete BA by then.
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âŠand also to take some of the credibility earned by the real doctors and attach it to the celebrity.
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Agreed. Itâs mutually beneficial to both parties. Sometimes, they do give those things to people without degrees whoâve made real contributions to our society though.
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Exactly right, Enkita. This is sloppy writing. Cory, who is supposed to be a writer, but who couldnât use a dash correctly to save his life, should have said âthe professorâs.â
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I got the impression that you were being extra defensive based on your history of having been in a doctorate program. I was letting the conversation go before you called me back to it.
I donât have a chip on my shoulder about doctorates. My previous statements have expressed the general nature of my distaste for society vouching as a whole for people based on academic achievements that do not factually have a 1:1 relationship with being respectable people. This isnât just about doctorates, but also the military and the police and judges and celebrities and politicians. Cosbyâs earned degree doesnât net him any positives in my book if he is in fact guilty of the things heâs been accused of. Just because someone signs up for the military, it doesnât make them a hero per se. Just because someone is a cop doesnât mean theyâre honest or law-abiding themselves. But in society we generally accept these myths as a shorthand for raising some people up in praise or respect. Iâm just saying weâre using the wrong criteria for such determinations.
I donât know if itâs because you didnât read everything I wrote or youâre coming into the conversation later than others, but you seem to have missed that the original discussion thread that I was talking about was respect for people with doctorates, which does speak to more than just being an expert in your field. It says that being an expert in your field garners you something other than recognition of what youâve achieved. I guess it would come down to a semantic argument of what ârespectâ means. To me, respect for a person with a doctorate is from their expertise and hard work itself, the demonstration thereof, not the title or the piece of paper. I also value non-academic achievement over academic achievement because academic achievement is usually for personal development, which is certainly laudable, but some non-academic achievements, such as the example of building a homeless shelter that someone else mentioned earlier, help the community.
Iâm not personally defensive at all. That said, I have friends who are in their tenth year of working on a doctorate so I do take exception to someone with issues around academia or something denigrating their achievements, yes.
Oh, I saw it. I just thought you were full of it.
Yeah, all of those engineers who designed bridges and figured out how to make them work or who came up with the transistor, for example, sure didnât help anyone and it was just personal development. Youâre not surrounded, both physically and culturally, by things created by people with academic degrees at all.
Your Cosby example is goal post moving and a straw man since I donât see anyone pointing to him as a positive example or as someone who should be listened to and respected simply because he did the actual work to get a doctorate in Education.
Iâm not denigrating their academic achievements. Iâm saying I just donât value them on a social scale as much as I do actual work that helps the community.
Youâre still ignoring the nuance of what Iâm saying. Your example supports exactly what I said here:
The engineers deserve respect for the things they did after achieving their degrees. The demonstration of their skill in building bridges and levees and whatnot is what they deserve respect for. Iâd respect an engineer less if they got a degree and never used it because they didnât do anything productive with it.
My Cosby example isnât goal post moving because he has a doctorate he earned. If having a doctorate earns you respect in and of itself without any other context, then we must respect Cosby. If not, then thereâs more nuance to high level degrees beyond: high level degree = hard work + intelligence = deserving respect. There are a lot more factors in the âdeserving respectâ part of the equation for me. Your mileage may vary.
I respect that Cosby put in the work to get a doctorate in education and that it is an achiviement. Am I not supposed to because he turns out to be a serial rapist? Do you live in a black and white world (pardon the pun)?
I personally wouldnât see it as a devaluation of the degree to give someone who wrote magnificent world changing literature, or who cured a disease after years of research, even if they never graduated high school.
I know itâs not how honorary degrees work in practice, but I sort of like the idea of âmeritâ or âserviceâ doctorates for contributing massively to a field in a way that makes them the equal of any PhD. Make up a rubric, put it to a faculty vote. Very few people will get the degrees in the end, but itâs an interesting idea as long as it doesnât get abused. But hell, people set up unaccredited institutions and call themselves âdoctorâ all the time, it canât be worse than that.
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