The National Review was founded in 1955 and has had a long and often honorable history as a conservative journal. It was started by William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley was probably called many things, but I doubt that anyone ever called him dumb.

That’s the reason I was surprised by Kyle Smith’s hit job on Dr. Jill Biden’s dissertation. Smith is the National Review’s critic-at-large and is also a film and theatre critic. Obviously, he’s not dumb either; he graduated cum laude from Yale. However, for someone with his credentials, the strange and amateurish articles about Dr. Biden’s dissertation should be an embarrassment for him and the publication.

I would imagine that Buckley would be embarrassed, too.

In the first place, I don’t understand the Right’s interest in Dr. Biden’s degree or whether she should be called Dr. Biden. It’s a silly sort of argument that probably doesn’t affect anything or anybody. For the record, I believe that anyone with an earned doctorate deserves to be addressed Dr. (Last Name) whenever an honorific is used. I doubt that Joe calls her Dr. Biden, but I would—just as I addressed my college professors, several colleagues on the seminar circuit, and most of the pastors I’ve had over the last forty or fifty years. They earned it, they deserve it, and I would be mean-spirited and/or ignorant to deny it.

That’s the reason that, for the most part, I’ve ignored this entire thing. I’m much more interested in having a president in office that actually has a plan, listens to experts in various fields, and speaks an understandable sort of English. It’s also nice that when he speaks, it’s not always about him.

Obviously, Kyle Smith considers it an important subject. He’s written three columns on it. Either it’s important or—in the midst of a presidential transition—he thinks it’s a slow news day. He wrote an article entitled “Jill Biden’s Doctorate Is Garbage Because Her Doctorate Is Garbage.” Then he followed up the next day with more of the same. And then on December 18, he wrote a third column, entitled “The Contradictions and Conceptual Errors of Jill Biden’s Garbage Dissertation.”

In one of them, he suggests that Dr. Biden’s degree is less than deserved because it came from the University of Delaware, “which is deeply connected to her husband.” He also attempts to diminish everyone who has ever earned an Ed.D. It is, he says, “a degree that only deeply unimpressive people feel confers the honorific “Doctor.”  

Although it seems that he had ample time and space to challenge any part of the dissertation, Mr. Smith fails to deal with it on factual grounds. Were her findings accurate, her conclusions appropriate, and her recommendations helpful? Instead, he simply gets catty.

I’ll agree, if Mr. Smith is reporting it correctly, that the dissertation should have been proofed more thoroughly. After all, there is a vast difference between “undeserved” and “underserved.” However, most of the rest of his comments seem to be scratching through the paper, pulling lines out of context, and exclaiming that he, who has no credentials in providing education, is smarter than Dr. Biden.

I haven’t read the dissertation myself. However, I do have some understanding of it. Over the years, I’ve edited several dissertations and more master’s theses. One of these dealt with the same subject as Dr. Biden’s. It seems that there has been for some years a concern that roughly a third of the students who enter a community college do not complete the two-year course. The research for the paper included a survey of the students and several focus groups, one with students and another with faculty members.

According to the candidate’s research, the answer to the first question was that students were not engaged with the college. They came, took their classes, and went back home. Much of what has traditionally been considered the college experience did not exist for them. Then it turned to appropriate actions that might make a commuter college more important to the students.  From the qualitative research, the candidate was able to assemble a number of ideas, and one of them was a student center.

That’s what caught my eye on Mr. Smith’s third column, this paragraph which not only illustrates Mr. Smith’s line of attack but also shows either a deep misunderstanding of the scope of the dissertation or simply an attempt to sling a few more lines of criticism at it.

“Everything is based on anecdotes or soft data, such as the results of insipid surveys she sent out asking Delaware Tech students whether they agreed with her ideas. Surprise! Students would like a student center to be built. But so what? Wouldn’t students say yes to any proposed amenity? Students would likely say yes to a new screening room, tennis court, or fro-yo lounge, but that doesn’t mean these would be wise uses of the institution’s money. How much would a student center cost? Biden doesn’t say. Would the benefit be worth the cost? Biden is silent on the question. Even if a student center were worth the cost, would some other potential use of that money be even more worthwhile? The question never crosses Biden’s mind. Biden simply proceeds from the assumption that the world is a place of unlimited resources for things she wants. Whatever additional time, money, and effort are required will magically appear. This is not a scholarly approach.”

I would like to see the question dealing with student unions. Since he read it and has a copy of the dissertation, he might have included it. Is it really vacuous, or is it penetrating? I don’t know without reviewing the survey instrument and knowing how the quantitative information was used with the qualitative. However, I do know that things such as cost-benefit analyses are not usually within the scope of a dissertation like this, nor are the budgetary requirements. In the paper I have read (and edited) the questions were that, given the symptom of a two-thirds completion rate, what is the problem, and then what can we do to solve the problem.

Dissertations, magazine columns, novels, and poems come in a nearly infinite variation of usefulness. Opinions will vary regarding that usefulness. I  know and admit those things. What I don’t know is why someone with a platform such as Mr. Smith’s feels that it’s appropriate to spend three columns attacking someone for obtaining a degree and being addressed according to that degree.

Mr. Smith’s title at The National Review is, as I noted, critic-at-large. He usually focuses on movies, theatre, and music. In these three pieces, he not only sets the boundaries for real academic degrees, scholarly work, appropriate and inappropriate research, statistical bounds, and a host of other things where—so far as I can tell from reading his bio—he has no basis for his opinions. That, of course, didn’t prevent him from advancing them. I’ll offer him one of his own back: People who are actually smart understand that being in possession of a credential is no proof of intelligence. Maybe that’s what the “at-large” means.