July 3, 2024
Madam President's Midwit Manifesto
reviewing the dissertation of the woman (probably) running the country
by HOLLY MATHNERD
HollyMathnerd.Substack.com
Special thanks to my friends J. Daniel Sawyer and Josh Slocum for their editorial assistance and encouragement as I worked on this epic-length post.
Why Jill Biden’s Dissertation Matters
During the debate of June 27, 2024, Americans got sufficient evidence to accept that our country is in the situation that many of us suspected: Joe Biden is non compos mentis, suffering from cognitive decline too severe to allow him to serve as President in anything other than name.
The 25th amendment is typically invoked, and power transferred to the Vice President, when the President of the United States has a colonoscopy and thus will be under anesthesia for an hour. That the President is suffering from dementia and power has not transferred to the Vice President means that the country is in the midst of an ongoing coup. No, that’s not melodramatic. Who is running the country? We don’t know for sure. But now we know that it’s definitely not the person we elected. By definition, that is a coup.
It may be that a diffuse group is carrying out the duties of the President, but it is still likely that one person is putting paper and pen in Joe Biden’s hands and telling him where to sign. That’s the person who is acting President for my purposes. The most likely candidate for acting President is First Lady Jill Biden. I may be wrong; it may be someone else entirely. But there is good reason to suspect her, and she’s the only named candidate of which I am aware. In the absence of contradictory evidence, it is a reasonable working assumption.
With that context in mind, I carefully and closely read her dissertation to get an idea of her intellectual capabilities and worldview. I skimmed it a few years ago during the “call her doctor!” controversy, but this time I read it quite closely.
I wanted to understand what sort of mind will be making the decisions if the President has to be woken up to make nuclear decisions. How does she think? What kind of work ethic does she have? Is she intelligent and conscientious?
What I learned was more than a little bit startling.
Her Dissertation in Context
Jill Biden was awarded her doctorate of education from the University of Delaware in January 2007, the capstone of an education that included a bachelor’s degree in English and master’s degrees in education and English. She also has longtime experience teaching English at the community college level.
A doctoral dissertation represents an original contribution to the body of knowledge in its field. It involves the extensive collection and rigorous analysis of substantial data. Beyond its scholarly significance, a dissertation serves as a showcase of one's mastery and academic prowess. If there is any work that merits meticulous attention, including enlisting others to painstakingly review it for errors, it is unquestionably the doctoral dissertation.
The title of the dissertation is: “Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs”. Note that this seems to speak to a broad topic — the needs of community college students in general.
Summary of the Dissertation Itself
Y’all, I think I understand why the Biden family thinks it’s fine for Dementia Daddy to keep running the country. It may not, actually, be a sick desperation to hold onto power. Or at least, not fully.
It really and truly might just be that with Jill as Matriarch, their standard for intellectual capacity is so low that Joe seems to be just fine by comparison.
Her dissertation is so terrible, lazy, pathetic, and lacking in anything that’s even ambition-, originality-, or creativity- adjacent, that I wondered if clever conservatives wrote a parody and flooded the internet with it. But there is a lot of coverage of how bad it is, and the issues described match what I found, confirming that yes, I read her actual dissertation.
The university who gave her a doctorate for this travesty also issued a statement in support of her, which served as final proof, universities being what they are these days.
I had to choose what to mock and what to ignore, in order to prevent this post from being as long as the dissertation itself. Even so, this is very long. Some of the most revealing, jaw-dropping aspects are in the sections on Papers 2 and 3, so I hope at least some of you will read all the way to the end.
The document is 137 pages, of which the dissertation itself, from Abstract to Conclusion, is 80 pages. The majority of the 80 pages consists of putting the survey results into words, often with unforgivable mistakes of simple arithmetic. For example: “Of the 159 students surveyed, 55 receive financial aid; 41 pay their own tuition bills; 45 students’ parents pay; 3 spouses pay; 9 receive scholarships; and 9 others receive funds through the GI bill, vocational rehabilitation programs, or grants. Thus, only one-quarter of the students are able to finance their education themselves.”
First—yes, this doctoral dissertation surveyed only 159 students. Or was it 162? The breakdown subtotals add up to 162, not 159. This error is symptomatic of the lack of attention to detail in the whole project.
The rest of the page count is taken up by several appendices and transcripts of interviews.
The entire thing can be summarized in a few sentences: community college students often drop out, and this is bad for community colleges. Community college administrators can help fewer students drop out by asking themselves, “What would an overindulgent mommy who was terrified of having her adult children no longer need her do to make them as dependent as possible?” Then, after answering that question in full, start doing those things.
Midwit Manifesto: Abstract and Introduction
The final sentence of the one-paragraph Abstract provides the reader a taste of the insipidity to come: “Overall, problem areas are identified, and recommendations and solutions are offered and encouraged.” If you’re wondering how a solution can be encouraged, congratulations on speaking English, not bureaucratese. She means, of course, that she encourages people to offer potential solutions. The entire paper demonstrates one of the most powerful elements of that odious English dialect. In bureaucratese, qualifiers and transitional phrases get dropped in order to artificially basket non-similar items, which lends an air of disinterested authority to an otherwise stupid thought.
But it only does that effectively when the sentence doesn’t jump out at the reader as the kind of error likely to be made by an English language learner, who hasn’t mastered the language effectively enough yet to understand that only people can have courage and thus only people can be encouraged.
The abstract promises to focus on four types of student needs: academic, psychological, social, and physical. If you are anticipating reading about how the college can only effectively meet academic needs but can possibly provide some support to students and their families in meeting the other three types of needs themselves, well, prepare for disappointment.
The abstract also promises to discuss “the nature of the pre-tech (developmental) population”. It implies that the entire paper is about that particular population, but sets the tone for what is to come by not being clear on that point.
The introduction has an error in the second sentence: “The needs of the student population are often undeserved, resulting in a student drop-out rate of almost one third.” She meant “underserved,” which is the primary idea in her paper: community college students drop out because community colleges don’t do a good enough job of meeting their needs.
The introduction lays out the structure of what readers can expect. Paper I will provide a literature review in student retention, studying the promised four areas: academic, social, psychological, and physical. Paper II, the methodology section, includes interviews with faculty and students as well as an interview with Dr. Vincent Tinto, who is described as a “student retention expert,” and the results of what she calls “surveys.” It also looks at the student retention rates for Delaware Tech from 2002 to the present.
At the time she wrote this paper, 2006, that was a whole four years.
She studied four years worth of records of one set of statistics on one metric.
For her doctoral dissertation.
Finally, Paper III “discusses solutions and recommendations to the problem of student retention at Delaware Technical & Community College”. Compare this to the title, which promises insight into a broad topic, and note that we’ve already moved to a tiny, niche topic — the needs of one community college’s students, based on four years of statistics and her “surveys”.
It also moves back into English-language-learner territory with the sentence: “It offers a reflection of the information and statistics gathered.” Perhaps she meant that it reflects on these things, or perhaps she meant that this section reiterates these things and thus provides “reflection” in the sense of providing an angle of examination? We shall see!
Midwit Manifesto: Overview, Historical Background, and Pre-Tech
The overview kicks off one theme of this paper: innumeracy, lack of attention to detail, and inexcusably stupid word-count padding. She starts with describing the “face” of a community college classroom. “Three quarters of the class will be Caucasian; one quarter of the class will be African American; one seat will hold a Latino; and the remaining seats will be filled with students of Asian descent or non-resident aliens.”
Three quarters plus one quarter…plus some extra!
“Almost two-thirds will be part-time students, with the remaining one-third attending college on a full-time basis.” Really, Jill? With 2/3 being part-time, I thought the other third were tenured professors on sabbatical taking community classes for fun. Thanks for clearing that up!
Interestingly, she freely admits that diversity in classrooms often results in lower standards. I believe this is what the kids call “saying the quiet part out loud”: “Although there is strength in diversity as a classroom component, the lack of homogeneity in academic ability makes it difficult to teach to a single standard.”
The Overview goes into great detail about how Delaware Tech accepts everyone, regardless of how ill-prepared they are for college: “The open door policy at Delaware Tech ensures that all students can pursue the American Dream of attaining a college education. The placement test (CPT) places students into classes where they can achieve success – whether it is basic level, pre-tech level, or regular college credit level courses.” As all students must have a high school diploma or equivalent, this is a stunning admission — that some students, upon entrance, place into courses that are two levels below college credit.
Rather than comment on this, Biden immediately moves to a declaration that community colleges have a high dropout rate because the community college is not an attentive enough parent. She lists all the extra help available, including writing labs and tutoring in every academic department, but concludes: “Yet, with all these services offered, the needs of the student population are underserved.”
Historical Background
In the Historical Background section, she writes about the history of community colleges and betrays, through her citations, how deeply lazy she was in the preparation of this project. She cites many sources, and in nearly every case, the page number is something between page 1 and page 30. How convenient! In the sole case where she cites a page number above 30, the citations are all from three pages in a single source.
She summarizes a movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to have universities focus on the junior and senior years, relegating freshman and sophomore year work to “junior colleges,” as being the root source for the creation of community colleges. She also describes a “debate” between advocates of two ideas: whether community colleges should offer vocational and technical training, thus focusing on increasing student earning power, or focus on preparing students to move on to four-year colleges, thus prioritizing academic rigor.
This section is mostly error-free, but that’s because it’s largely not her writing. It mostly consists of simply stringing together and citing facts, usually as direct quotes: “Two major events influenced the positive direction of the community college: The Truman Commission on Higher Education ‘popularized the term community college, and its findings led to the massive expansion of comprehensive community college that took place in the 1950s and 1960s’ (Witt et al., 1995, p. 87), and the early proponents of the community college, ‘Koos, Cambell, Ellis, and Zook, pushed for comprehensive junior colleges that would meet the diverse needs of the American population’ (Witt et al., 1995, p. 87).”
After a detailed explanation of how the GI Bill expanded college access for the middle and working class, she describes the founding of Delaware Tech by the in-depth research of….quoting from page two of its catalog.
Pre-Tech Students
The next section introduces “pre-tech” students, the cohort of students whose needs she is mostly concerned with meeting.
Pre-Tech Students are described in admirably honest terms: “At Delaware Tech, the term “pre-tech” is synonymous with developmental learners. These learners are most often defined as lacking in basic educational skills, possessing low IQ levels, lacking study skills, and/or possibly learning disabled.”
Midwit Manifesto: This Woman Doesn’t Understand Percentages
In the pre-tech section, she cites a statistic that 74% of first-time community college students required a developmental education and claims, “At Delaware Tech, the numbers of students in pre-tech classes substantiate the increasing percentages.” Then she lays out the specific numbers of developmental and college-level course sections at Delaware Tech, which she manages to add correctly. There are 102 developmental sections and 177 college level sections. She then concludes, “The percentage of developmental classes mirrors the general research at 71.3 percent of total classes offered.”
I have no idea how she made this ludicrous mistake. I am an experienced mathematics tutor and can usually figure out what someone was thinking and where they went wrong. In this case, I am mystified.
She calculated that there were 102 developmental sections and 177 college level sections. There are significantly more college level sections, yet she concluded that the developmental sections were 71.3% of the total sections offered.
102 + 177 = 279.
102 is 36.6% of 279.
Where did 71.3% come from?
She didn’t just reverse the figures, as the college level courses were 63.4% of the total. 102 is 57.6% of 177, so that’s not the mistake she made, either. I have no idea how or where 71.3% was found out of these numbers.
I went over this several times, and had several friends go over it as well. In the spirit of charity, I tried to think of how she could possibly have arrived at this number. All I could come up with for an idea was this: perhaps 71.3% is a statistic regarding developmental learners elsewhere in the Delaware Tech statistics she examined, and was cited here out of disorganization. Then perhaps it made its way into the final draft because she didn’t have the mathematical intuition to recognize that 102 is less than 177 and thus could not be a majority of the course sections.
A bright sixth-grader with a calculator was definitely called for to check her work in this doctoral dissertation.
This is more significant than it may at first appear. This isn’t just a math nerd being snobbish about someone being sloppy with numbers.
Her entire paper is written from the premise that Delaware Tech offers an appropriate model for commenting on broad issues of student retention in community colleges. But according to her own offered numbers, Delaware Tech’s percentage of developmental sections is 36.6%, less than half the cited statistic for community colleges in general.
The entire rest of the paper is based on the false premise that Delaware Tech offers a good proxy for community colleges in general and thus her “survey” of Delaware Tech students is meaningful to larger issues in education.
This should have taken her paper in an entirely different direction! She should have been examining Delaware Tech from the lens of “why does a community college whose population is radically different from normal community college populations still have a retention problem?”
And you know what? That would have been an interesting and worthwhile project, in competent hands. One possibly even worthy of a doctoral dissertation.
End of Overview
Here she finally comments on the lack of preparation that Delaware high schools are providing, but her sole suggestion is just silly. Many community college students come from a vocational school program, which uses the Modern Language Association (MLA) format. Instead, they should use the American Psychological Association (APA) format. The two citation styles have minimal differences for papers of the length that community college students would be writing, and this suggestion is ridiculous.
Because the switch from (Jones, p. 22) to (Jones, 1997, p. 22) is the real issue for students “lacking in basic educational skills, possessing low IQ levels, lacking study skills, and/or possibly learning disabled.”
Sure, lady.
The final noteworthy element of this section is the extent to which she infantilizes the adult students served by community colleges: “For example, adult students may not realize that they have physical problems such as ADHD, hearing problems, or visual problems. The teacher, in effect, is often the first one to notice that the student is inattentive or squinting or asking a question about material that has just been discussed. It then becomes the responsibility of the instructor to direct a student to the school psychologist or nurse.”
Yes, she really seems to think that community college students drop out because they need their community college instructors to do a better job of figuring out that they need glasses.
It’s something of a trope that every female on the left thinks the job of government is to be everyone’s mother. Like most tropes, it has large elements of truth but quickly becomes a strawman when applied across the board.
But damn if she doesn’t make the trope look reasonable!
http://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/madam-presidents-midwit-manifesto
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