Fake Academic Scholarship Exposed … Yet Again

Jill Biden (Image: YouTube screen grab)

By Geoffrey Ingersoll

LITERALLY ZERO PERCENT

Anybody with even a passing interest in university scholarship knows many academic fields are basically made up. In some cases, literally, as in they invented datasets in their studies and then published them as if they were real.

The “Grievance Studies Affair” is a perfect (and deliciously subversive) recent example of just how fugazi the social sciences are. In it, Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose set out to prove the social sciences “lacked rigor” — or more directly, were totally made up — by inventing what they believed to be clearly absurd social science research and attempting to get it published.

They did end up getting 7 papers accepted in academic journals, the most infamous of which cast “urban dog parks” as “rape-condoning spaces” and petri dishes for “canine rape culture.”

A new study that actually does have rigor essentially proved the thesis of 2019’s Grievance Studies experiment. Published in Nature April 1, the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) project trying to replicate 164 studies found that a stunning 49% of the studies they reviewed could not be replicated.

And they even broke it down by field. Econ/Polisci scored the highest at around 60%, then sociology cratered at around 25%.

The most shocking of all: Social sciences research in the education field notched a big fat zero. Yes, zero percent of the scholarship SCORE sampled on education was replicable. “0 percent of education papers were replicated,” noted Wesley Yang.

This makes total sense if you’ve ever read DOCTOR Jill Biden’s awful dissertation, which was full of typos and math mistakes, but resulted in her receiving a doctorate in education from the University of Delaware.

Perhaps I wouldn’t be so shocked if I didn’t know that these people then go on with their shiny new credentials to become superintendents and school administrators. These folks who produce less than bupkis in their field are the ones deciding how public education operates.

It’s mystifying.

Remind me, why are we spending money on this? Oh, you didn’t know?

Between the summers of 2021-2022, American taxpayers spent about $39 billion on graduate-level student loans. Some of that doubtless went to EdDs like DOCTOR Jill.

Ironically, one of the most replicated findings in education research over the years is that advanced education degrees have zero effect on student test scores. That should be a surprise, given all that extra studying, but just imagine if DOCTOR Jill were teaching you high school English.

You think her doctorate would make her more capable? Probably not.

In a more sane world, those billions would go to ICE or a wall or even just everyone gets one free hot dog at the ball game. Anything but fake credentials and fake studies.

As noted earlier at Liberty Unyielding, Jill Biden’s dissertation was “unbelievably awful”:

Jill Biden calls herself “Dr.” because she received an Ed.D. degree. To get that degree, she wrote a dreadfully bad “dissertation/executive position paper.” It was not, in substance, a dissertation, and its quality was simply awful. Indeed, its quality was so poor that people would have questioned its adequacy, if her husband hadn’t been a powerful politician in Delaware, whose state university gave her the degree.

Yet, a lecturer emeritus got canceled by Northwestern University recently for questioning whether Jill Biden should be called “Dr.”

As Townhall notes, “Dr.” Jill Biden’s “dissertation” was utter tripe — full of typos and math mistakes even a child wouldn’t make, that wouldn’t be tolerated in a high-school paper. Biden’s paper also showed deep ignorance about history and our educational system.

For example, Mrs. Biden’s paper shows that she doesn’t understand fractions, or basic arithmetic, unlike most schoolchildren and adults. In it, she mistakenly wrote that three-quarters plus one-quarter does not add up to one: “Three quarters of the class will be Caucasian; one quarter of the class will be African American…the remaining seats will be filled with students of Asian descent or non-resident aliens.” What remaining seats?

Mrs. Biden also described a quintupling of enrollment as a mere 230% increase — getting the math wrong by a factor of almost two: “‘By 1963, public and private two year headcount enrollment stood at 850,361. By 1980, enrollment had grown to 4,526,287… approximately a 230 percent increase in student attendance.’”

People assume that because Mrs. Biden received a doctorate, her paper must have been a “dissertation.” But it wasn’t; in reality, it was a mere “executive position paper.” As law professor Eugene Volokh notes, the University of Delaware did not require Mrs. Biden’s paper to conduct any original research, as is required for a dissertation. Her degree was also not like a Ph.D, because it required less coursework than is needed to get even a lesser professional degree like a J.D.

Even lawyers need three years of full-time study to get a J.D; Mrs. Biden’s degree only required part-time study for 3-4 years.

So her degree wasn’t the equivalent of a Ph.D, a medical degree, or even a professional degree, in terms of its rigor.

The liberal media, like the New York Times, often calls conservative doctors like neurosurgeon Ben Carson “Mr.”

Yet it now insists that Mrs. Biden, who is not a physician, must be called “Dr.” The media’s misleading references to Mrs. Biden as “Dr.” have resulted in some people — including TV personalities — falsely believing that Biden is a medical doctor.

People who question whether Mrs. Biden should be referred to as “Doctor,” are accused of sexism and racism by the liberal media.

Many years ago, even liberal newspapers like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times admitted that it was inappropriate to call Mrs. Biden “Doctor,” because she doesn’t have a medical degree. Reporters argued that only physicians should be referred to as “Doctor,” citing the stylebooks of newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In 2017, the Washington Post reiterated this longstanding rule in explaining why a conservative White House official should not be referred to as “Dr.,” even though he had a PhD.

But after conservatives questioned Mrs. Biden’s use of the title, and she seemed likely to become first lady, the liberal media switched position to claim that it is sexist not to call Mrs. Biden “Doctor.” This is gaslighting by the media, not to mention inconsistent and hypocritical.