...is pissed that Maya Angelou was referred to as "Dr."
No comment.
UPDATE: Reader Raphael Magarik writes to point out that Dr. Oppenheimer's PhD is in "religious studies." Wissenschaften these days are not what they used to be.
ADDENDUM: Reader Josh Blanchard points out that even Oppenheimer knows his PhD is a fraud; from his little smear on Dr. Angelou:
[T]hese titles are often pretty meaningless. It’s true that I got a Ph.D. in religion over 10 years ago, but I am hardly a scholar. I haven’t kept up with the latest scholarly writing and have never held a tenure-track academic post. Unlike physicians, I can’t actually do anything to help people. What’s more, there are plenty of people in the field of religion with only master’s degrees, or less—clergy, laypeople, enthusiastic amateurs—who know plenty more about my subject than I do. My doctorate just signals that I went through a program of exams and paper-writing, including a thesis-length paper at the end. But so
what? Graduate school is not even that hard. I am a good cocktail-party bullshit artist, but I was that before grad school, and some of the best BS’ers I know have only a B.A.
Too bad he didn't get a PhD in an actual discipline.
ANOTHER: Philosopher Carrie Swanson (Iowa) writes:
One wonders why 'Dr.' Oppenheimer finds it so galling---20 years on---that 'Operator Jones' is 'aping' a 'certain level of expertise'. He 'always' thinks of Operator Jones when he 'encounters a case of title inflation'. Is it because he can't stand to concede that even a blue-collar public transportation worker can rightfully claim a particular level of expertise regarding the operation of a goddamn interstate bus? Or is it because he regards the conductor of said mode of transport as an 'ape'?
Here's a vid of Maya Angelou reciting her poem 'The Mask'. I think she exhibits a 'certain level of expertise' in something--call it human wisdom---which the pseudo-doctor Oppenheimer has no inkling of.
AND ONE MORE: I've been asked, fairly, not to dismiss the entire field of "religious studies" because Mark Oppenheimer is a hack. I do doubt that the field itself is a Wissenschaft, since it is an amalgamation of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, classicists and so on--and to that extent, serious scholarly work is done under the rubric "religious studies," and I should not imply otherwise.
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