DoctorateTitleGate - Channeling Betty Ford (and learning to keep your Ph.D. under wraps)

 First Lad Betty Ford was one of us: open about being flawed (enough to need at stint in rehab), not glam, and average in most ways. All she lacked was a weight problem to have been classified Everywoman. 

You bet, she made us feel good about ourselves. Most of us women didn’t back then (1974 – 1977) as the second round of women’s liberation was just emerging.

Sigh. How we want Betty back in these confusing times. Too many of us have been losing some of our newly found self-confidence. For the first time in about 34 months (Paul Weiss chair Brad Karp had cast a spell of self-esteem on me) I allowed two women to bully me. I feel such shame at how I have regressed. 

But instead of Betty we have a First Lady who somehow has gotten caught in DoctorateTitleGate. That’s Jill Biden. Not her fault but there it is.

At a sports event she was referred to as "Doctor." She has a Ph.D., not the MD. Megyn Kelly, who has engineered a comeback, put the knock on Jill for somehow allowing that to happen. There was the implication that the First Lady was attempting to pull a fast one and simulating MD branding. (Good thing there was no medical emergency at the game.)

Soon enough, liberals took on Kelly, a conservative dating back to a stint at Fox. Here you can read all about it in The Hill. Conservatives have long had an issue with Jill The Doctor.

My trouble with the doctorate title isn’t suspicion that Jill is up to brand enhancement. It’s that it can serve as a distancing mechanism in the struggle to connect.

Sure, in careerist things it can be useful, perhaps downright necessary, to trot out those letters after one’s name. But not always.

Usually, I keep mine own Ph.D. (linguistics and literature) under wraps. In client work, both for coaching and human resources communications, it could alienate. In America we give lip service to higher education but in daily real life we want none of all that.

To neutralize DoctorateTitleGate Jill might channel Betty. That is, help us feel good about ourselves again. Tell me I’m okay, even though I got the wrong degree. It should have been in Computer Science. 

Meanwhile OpenAI’s ChatGPT will probably sit for a Ph.D. exam. It already had passed those in business and law.

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