Walk with me through the vapid pages of her 20,000-word piece of litter-box lining.
Walk with me through the vapid pages of her 20,000-word piece of litter-box lining.
J ill Biden’s embarrassing 2006 dissertation, which I mocked here and extensively quoted here, is essentially a weakly argued 20,000-word op-ed that offers zero hard evidence for her policy proposals, which are that Delaware Tech (her employer at the time) should beef up its Wellness Center, add a student center, and offer lots of counseling and mentorship to students in order to increase retention rates, which she says were about two-thirds at her institution, about par for community colleges.
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.
To distract from her own opinions, Biden pumps in lots of other people’s as well, dressed up as citation: “Bryant and Crockett (2005) argues [sic] that the job of an advisor does not end when student [sic] signs up for classes — the advisor should be connected to students until the day they graduate.” The idea of flooding the zone with student advisers is barely an idea: Biden at no point considers whether it is worth it, on either side, for community colleges to press harder to retain their least-motivated students. Unlike a bachelor’s degree, a degree from a community college is not a particularly valuable credential, and it may be that many students are correct in believing that a community-college degree is not worth the time or other resources required to obtain it, or simply believe that they are not learning very much. Every hour a community-college student spends on his studies is an hour he is not spending on some other activity. Perhaps that other activity is a job in which having a community-college degree confers zero additional value. The question is at least worth considering, but Biden does not consider it. She, a community-college instructor, simply proceeds from the assumption that a community-college degree is a thing of such obvious value that both students and educators should press for as many students to earn them as possible, with no mention of cost. It doesn’t cross her mind that someone in a community college might have something better, more interesting, or more remunerative to do with his time.
A chat session she convened with other faculty members (which she considers meaningful original research) suggests an ulterior motive for students who aren’t interested in studying: Pre-Obamacare, adults who could show that they were full-time students could remain covered by their parents’ insurance. (Obamacare removed the student requirement for adults up to age 26.) Biden simply breezes by this piece of information, barely noticing that her own colleagues are telling her some “students” are present for the health insurance, not to learn anything. Why fret about retaining students who aren’t there to study in the first place?
Biden gets so caught up in repeating vapid liberal nostrums that she doesn’t even realize some of them contradict others. She claims without evidence that a major reason “[m]any students do not feel comfortable at their community college” is “a lack of diversity” in “the student population,” having forgotten that the first sentence of her paper is this one: “Delaware Technical and Community College serves a highly diverse student body in terms of age, gender, race, and socio-economic status.” Moreover, Delaware Tech is typical of community colleges in general: “Diversity, rather than homogeneity, is the norm.” So slipshod is Biden’s memory that the sentence that immediately precedes her bewailing “lack of diversity” is this one: “The National Center of Educational Statistics (1999), reported that ‘42.3 percent of African Americans in higher education are in the community college system, along with 50% of the Native American and 55.6% of Hispanic enrollment’ (Pope, 2002).” If about half of America’s minorities who are in higher education are in community colleges, these institutions would appear to be quite diverse indeed, if by “diverse” one means “largely nonwhite,” which appears to be Biden’s definition. Delaware Tech is by this definition considerably more diverse than the state in which it sits, which is 69 percent white.
Biden claims that another source of friction is the lack of diversity “in the make-up of the faculty, which creates a feeling of alienation,” but she provides no evidence for this claim either, nor does she provide a demographic breakdown of the Delaware Tech faculty. Many such assertions float through the paper, untethered to anything. I can see the red pen of my eighth-grade Social Studies teacher going furiously to work: “Where is the EVIDENCE?” When you’re married to a senator, ordinary dissertation standards have a way of disappearing.
Biden’s paper doesn’t even compare her meager findings about her own community college to what happens at other community colleges, because that would have meant more effort than she was willing to make, which was questioning a few people in her immediate vicinity, leafing through a few secondary sources, and typing out long strings of nugatory prose. Her paper is dressed-up barstool chitchat, not academic work. She is certainly entitled, as insecure people in possession of doctorates tend to do, to ask to be addressed as “doctor,” but the polite response should be: Sorry, I reserve that honorific for medical doctors. A somewhat less polite response would be: You’re not even an academic, you teach remedial English to community-college students, and your dissertation is kindling.