jill biden dissertation pdf download

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Jill Biden’s Garbage Dissertation, Explained

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To call Jill Biden ’s dissertation thin gruel is an insult to gruel. Whatever meager substance puddled in Bob Cratchit’s miserable bowl at mealtime was a bountiful feast compared with this paper. I wrote yesterday about the problems with this capstone project, the foundation of her Ed.D. degree and of the insistence of so many in recent days that we must call her “Dr.”

Mrs. Biden’s only original research consists of interviews with two — that’s right, two — ex-students and a few colleagues at Delaware Technical Community College, where she used to teach, plus the results of a vacuous questionnaire she wrote that was returned by about 150 people who worked or studied there. Oh, and she also called two nearby community colleges seeking interviews about their retention rates. One of them wouldn’t answer the question; the other wouldn’t assign anyone to speak to her at all. Telling us about this misadventure serves no academic purpose, though it does fill up four pages of her generously spaced paper. The transcripts of her group chats with campus figures and colleagues take up nearly 30 pages out of 129. The questionnaires eat up another 18 pages.

The dissertation, Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs, shimmers with the wan, term-papery feel of middle school, although in defense of today’s middle schoolers, they at least know how to use spell-checking software, unlike Mrs. Biden. Her 2006 paper notes that at Delaware Tech, her then-employer, a third of students dissolve into the ether every year, and in order to pad out her micron-thin proposals, none of which have anything to support them except her beliefs and anecdotal evidence (she suggests building a student center and beefing up the “Wellness Center” while increasing counseling and mentoring services), she shovels in piles of drivel. Opinions will differ on which of her efforts is of least value, but a strong contender presents itself at the moment when she reaches over for the course catalog on her desk and quotes at length from page two of its boilerplate introduction (“The College respects and cares for students as individuals and maintains a friendly an open institution which welcomes all students and supports their aspirations for a better life”). She follows up on this meaningless prattle by reiterating it in her own insipid words: “Responding to the current social and economic morés of the new millennium, Delaware Tech’s mission has adapted to meet the needs and goals of today’s students.”

Biden’s landfill of a paper contains potted histories of things everybody already knows, awkwardly phrased banalities (“Community colleges offer a myriad of support,” “As a community college, Delaware Tech mirrors the national profile of a community college,” “the unique nature of the classroom allows for a complexity of problems as well”), and childlike repetition (“This reason is one of many reasons that support the need for a campus psychologist.”)

Biden’s style is atrocious, her research is comical, her reasoning is muddled, and as one finishes the final vacuous line of this student-newspaper-style exercise (“A student retention plan requires diligence and effort — but most of all, leadership”), it is impossible not to be reminded that the University of Delaware, which granted Mrs. Biden an Ed.D. in 2007, is deeply connected to her husband. A more exacting, or even minimally self-respecting, university would have directed Mrs. Biden’s paper to the nearest trash receptacle. Jill Biden looks like yet another member of the Biden family who successfully leveraged the family name to obtain things of value that otherwise would have lain far beyond the reach of someone of such meager talents.

The typos and other miscues begin in the second sentence of Mrs. Biden’s introduction (“The needs of the student population are often undeserved [sic], resulting in a student drop-out rate of almost one third”) unless you count the table of contents, in which Biden misspells the word questionnaire. Easing into her subject, she churns through the reader’s time with undisguised filler such as block quotations of her then-employer’s mission statement, press-release blather (“Today, the community college not only answers the needs of transfer students but has also emerged to address the needs of career education, vocational and technical education, contract training, and community services”) and cutaways to comparable low-impact thoughts on community colleges taken from the very small stack of books she skimmed: “B.S. Hollinshead, president of a junior college in Pennsylvania, wrote that the junior college should be ‘a community college meeting community needs.’ (Cohen & Brawer, 2003, p. 20).” You don’t say. “Dr. George F. Zook, president of the American Council on Education in 1946, echoed Hollinshead’s sentiments . . .” and so on.

I say “skimmed,” but perhaps I’m being unfair. Let’s just observe that as a scholar, Biden certainly is fortunate : Again and again, the books she cites turn out to contain a huge proportion of the material relevant to her discussion in their first 20 pages. For instance, a book she leans on heavily to bulk up her word count, A. M. Cohen, F. B. Brawer, and C. B. Kisker’s The American Community College , contains material on pages 1, 6, 7, 9, 13, and 20 that she deemed worthy of quotation. (There is also strong evidence that she read pages 202–207). By an astonishing coincidence, seven of her 15 quotations from a book about community colleges by A. A. Witt et al. (and published by something called “The Community College Press”) come from the first 15 pages of the book, but we can be sure she also read pages 96–97 because four of the remainder come from those pages.

Biden is a writing teacher in dire need of a writing tutor: “In an effort to obtain upward mobility, returning GIs, [sic] took the opportunity to enroll in college” is a not-untypical sentence. She can barely get through a banality without an unnecessary comma or a spelling mistake and she says “skyrocket” when she means “plummet”: “Stress, anxiety, and depression set in when the student succumbs to feeling overwhelmed. The first sacrifice has to be school; hence, student retention rates skyrocket if there are no safeguards in place to help students cope with all they are trying to handle.”

Biden’s original research of distributing questionnaires and chatting with a few people on campus is not rigorous work that demonstrates mastery. It’s more like half a week of basic reporting. Indeed, given that questionnaires could be distributed by email, one could conceivably accomplish more or less everything Biden considers to be her original research in a single day . The 37 questions (most of them yes/no) contained in her student survey solicit such rudimentary information (“In your opinion, would a campus psychologist be helpful to students?” And “Have you ever used the writing center?” And “Has Delaware Tech provided you the support you need to thrive socially?”) that they seem more characteristic of the inquiries of a marketing department than an academic exploration. Given that actual community-college marketing departments have presumably done many larger and more detailed surveys in the past, Biden’s work looks entirely superfluous. (Biden’s sample size was 159 students, and she gives no indication that this group was anything other than a self-selecting cadre of those who sent back answers. She also sent out surveys to 100 faculty members, 69 of whom responded, and seven guidance counselors, of whom six responded. Is a survey of six people of any academic value whatsoever? As for her interviews of dropouts, I remind you that there were exactly two of them.)

All of Biden’s nominal research, her bromides and tautologies and unsupported assertions, are all wasted anyway. The entire paper may be rotten fruit, but it fell off a poisoned tree, which is Biden’s conceptual confusion. A professor who expected any rigor whatsoever from Biden would have drawn a red line through the entire paper and told her to start over. I’ll explain why in my next column.

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Higher Education

What jill biden’s dissertation reveals about her approach to higher education, by jeffrey r. young     nov 20, 2020.

Crush Rush / Shutterstock

It turns out that Jill Biden, the presumptive First Lady, has thought deeply about community colleges. In fact, she wrote her dissertation at the University of Delaware about how to improve retention at two-year colleges.

So what did she conclude? And what does it say about her thinking on higher education, as she prepares to move into the White House?

First, it’s safe to say that Jill Biden has closer ties to community colleges than any previous First Lady. She started her own higher education career at a community college—enrolling in Brandywine Junior College in Philadelphia before transferring to the University of Delaware. She has taught in community colleges for years, first in Delaware and more recently at Northern Virginia Community College just outside of Washington, DC. And she has said she plans to continue teaching even after her husband Joe becomes president. (While Donald Trump continues to dispute the election results, experts and a growing number of prominent Republican lawmakers say that it is unlikely that Trump’s legal challenges or political maneuvers will change the outcome of the Nov. 3 election.)

To go inside what college life was like this fall during the pandemic, check out our Pandemic Campus Diaries series on the EdSurge Podcast.

Joe Biden even gave a shout-out to college educators in his acceptance speech. “For American educators, this is a great day for you all. You’re going to have one of your own in the White House,” he said.

But back to the dissertation. Jill Biden’s focus area when pursuing her Doctor of Education degree was Educational Leadership. And she chose to present her research in the form of an “executive position paper,” which according to the program’s website “identifies a problem of significance to you and your organization, analyzes the problem thoroughly, and develops a feasible plan to solve the problem.”

The organization she chose to focus her paper on was Delaware Technical & Community College, where she was an English and writing instructor at the time of her graduate study. The title of her paper: “ Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs .”

In addition to giving a review of the literature, she interviewed and surveyed students and faculty, as well as faculty advisors, about their experiences and the challenges they faced regarding retention.

“Several themes regarding students’ needs have emerged,” she wrote. Her recommendations boiled down to holistic approach that included:

• A mandatory study skills course to help better prepare students for college-level work
• Better academic advising
• A student center or other central place to gather with other students.
• A psychologist to “administer educational testing and offer counseling.”
• And a wellness center.

“Delaware Tech has the capacity to be so much better than it is presently,” she wrote. “The key to student retention is a coordinated, cohesive effort by administration, faculty, staff, and students. A student retention plan requires diligence and effort—but most of all, leadership.”

As part of her literature review, Biden interviewed prominent experts in student retention. One of them was Vincent Tinto, now an emeritus professor of education at Syracuse University, who is a prominent expert on retention and author of “Completing College: Rethinking Institutional Action.”

Tinto says he knew little about the project at the time, but that he answered Biden’s questions by phone. “I had no idea what the dissertation was going to become,” he told EdSurge. “I get so many of these requests, and I never want to turn them down I talk to so many graduate students.”

Reading through the dissertation now, he says, his first reaction is “Amen.” He said that her paper gives a practical roadmap to solving key problems that had not yet been fully articulated at the time. “Most of the things she identified are the ones that need to and have now started to be addressed,” he said.

And he praised her focus on thinking deeply about the experience of students of all backgrounds and experience levels. “The first two pages of her dissertation, where she describes her classroom and students, speaks volumes about her commitment to diversity,” he said.

The passage he refers to reads:

“The community college classroom is unlike any other classroom in America. Diversity, rather than homogeneity, is the norm. In an average-sized class of twenty students at Delaware Tech, for example, most of the seats will be filled with young students who have just graduated from high school. The majority of these will be female. At least five seats will be filled with middle-aged men and women who have lost their jobs due to downsizing and/or outsourcing. One or two seats will be filled with students who have graduated from a GED program. Some seats will hold older women whose children have just entered college – now these women are taking the opportunity to earn college degrees themselves. 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. At least one quarter of the students will have children – most of them will be single mothers. Some will be the first in their families to attend college.”

It is clear that Jill Biden plans to advocate for community colleges as she enters the White House. Just this week, she spoke at a symposium led by the College Promise Career Institute, a nonprofit that has an effort called College Progress that aims to make community college free.

“Community colleges fuel our industries, and we need an educated skilled trained workforce to lead the world in a 21st century economy,” she said at the event. “This isn’t a Democratic issue or a Republican issue, it’s an American issue.”

Tinto, the Syracuse professor, said that he hopes that Biden continues to keep the issue of retention in mind as she furthers her advocacy. “I would personally hope that one of the things Dr. Biden would do is maybe establish a task force to look at what should we as a nation do to move the needle on retention,” he said.

Jeffrey R. Young ( @jryoung ) is the higher education editor at EdSurge and the producer and co-host of the EdSurge Podcast . He can be reached at jeff [at] edsurge [dot] com.

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When her husband became president of the United States on January 20, 2021, Dr. Jill Biden became the nation’s First Lady. Through Joe Biden’s long political career, Dr. Biden maintained her own career as an English professor teaching primarily in community colleges. The Bidens stood out in the Washington political world for their more-than-40-year marriage and their devotion to family. 

Jill Tracy Jacobs was born on June 3, 1951, in Hammonton, New Jersey, and grew up in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. She was the eldest of five sisters. Her father served in World War II and then became a banker. She graduated from Upper Moreland High School in 1969. 

Jill married Bill Stevenson in 1970, and they divorced in 1975, the same year that she graduated from the University of Delaware with a bachelor’s degree in English. She later earned two master’s degrees: one in reading from West Chester University in 1981 and another in English from Villanova University in 1987. In 2007, she received her PhD from the University of Delaware in educational leadership. Her dissertation was titled, “Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students' Needs.”

Jill met Joe Biden in 1975, three years after a car crash killed his first wife and daughter and injured his sons, Beau and Hunter. Joe’s brother introduced them, and although Joe was nearly nine years older than Jill, they hit it off. In his memoir, Promises to Keep , Biden noted that Jill embraced the Biden family, and Beau and Hunter adored her, prompting the boys to advise their father: “We think we should marry Jill.” They were married on June 17, 1977, at the United Nations Chapel in New York City with Beau and Hunter standing with them at the altar. Their daughter Ashley was born in 1981. 

A life-long educator, Jill Biden began her teaching career in public high schools in Delaware then worked at the Delaware Technical and Community College from 1993 to 2008. She was able to continue teaching in Delaware while her husband served in the Senate because he returned home most evenings to Delaware from Washington, DC. 

When Joe Biden became vice president to President Barack Obama, the Bidens moved to the district. In 2009, Jill Biden began teaching English at the Northern Virginia Community College. She was the first second lady (wife of the vice president) to continue working while her husband was in office. She pledged to continue teaching while First Lady.  

As second lady, Jill focused much of her time and energy on causes important to her, including raising money and awareness for cancer research, advocating for community colleges, and supporting military families. Together with Michelle Obama, Jill Biden started the Joining Forces initiative to support service members, veterans, and their families. 

After the death of Beau Biden in 2015 of brain cancer, Joe Biden announced that he would not run for president in 2016. The Bidens created the Biden Foundation and the Biden Cancer Initiative, but both organizations suspended operations after Joe Biden announced in 2019 that he would run for president. 

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Jill campaigned for her husband and served as one of his closest advisors. The Democratic National Convention in August 2020 was a mostly virtual event because of the coronavirus pandemic and was structured to appeal to voters watching on television at home. Jill spoke from an empty classroom at Brandywine High School, where she had once taught. In her speech, she focused on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on education and highlighted her devotion to her family through its personal tragedies and successes. 

Dr. Biden is the author of three books: Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops (2012), Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself (2019), and Joey: The Story of Joe Biden (2020). 

Steven Levingston

Editor The Washington Post

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Essay by Dr. Jill Biden in The Chronicle of Higher Education

The following essay penned by Dr. Jill Biden will be featured in the April 23 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, and can be found online HERE .

Community Colleges: Our Work Has Just Begun Jill Biden

I have been a teacher for almost three decades and a community-college instructor for the past 16 years. Last spring, President Obama asked me to increase awareness about one of the best-kept secrets of higher education: the very sizable and valuable contribution of community colleges. Since then I have been visiting colleges around the country and reporting back to the president about their challenges, innovations, and ideas. This issue is a priority for the Obama-Biden administration. We are committed to making community colleges better and more accessible to students across this nation.

The passage of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 was a substantial victory for community colleges. The final legislation does not contain everything our administration had proposed, but it does include one of the most significant new federal investments in higher education, and in community colleges, since the GI Bill was introduced, over 60 years ago.

Pell Grants had been threatened with a 60-percent funding decrease, but we stabilized the Pell program and ensured that such grants would increase with inflation. The Pell Grant victory will put money in the pockets of millions of full- and part-time community-college students, helping them pay for tuition, books, supplies, and living expenses. This increase in financial aid is coupled with the recently expanded Opportunity Tax Credit, which provides students a tax credit of up to $2,500 per year for up to four years to offset higher-education expenses, including a partial credit for those who owe no taxes. It also sets up income-based repayment of student loans, capping loan repayments at rates based on income and family size. As a lifelong teacher, I am particularly pleased that income-based repayment helps those who choose public-service careers. Graduates who work as teachers, nurses, or in other public-service professions—and those who serve in the military—can have their loans forgiven after 10 years.

The reconciliation bill also sets aside $2-billion ($500-million per year over four years) to develop and improve educational and training programs at community colleges. Throughout the nation, community colleges will receive funds to help them serve students more effectively, and to help form partnerships with regional industry clusters so that graduates will be prepared to excel in the local work force.

This administration's commitment to community colleges is a long-term one. The president has asked me to convene a national summit on community colleges in the fall. We will bring college presidents, instructors, and advocates together with business leaders and other stakeholders to share best practices and successful models for helping students gain the knowledge, training, certificates, and degrees needed to succeed. This will be a working summit, a setting where we can shine a spotlight on community colleges, highlight their utility to families and communities across the nation, nurture more collaboration, and generate additional policy ideas and goals for student success. As a community-college instructor, I am thrilled to be leading this summit and truly pleased to have the support of the administration.

Over the past 16 years, I have seen firsthand the power of community colleges to change lives. And that is, in large part, why I never really considered the possibility of not teaching at a community college after we moved to Washington last year. Since then I have been privileged to teach students from more than 22 countries.

As an English teacher, I frequently use journals and exercises in our school's learning lab as a tool for my students to develop their writing and composition skills. One exercise that is always productive is to encourage my students to write about their core beliefs as inspired by National Public Radio's This I Believe program. In these sessions, students listen to radio segments as examples—and then I encourage them to write about their own core beliefs. I am constantly moved and humbled by the experiences my students share in this exercise and in their journals about their dreams, challenges, and values.

Each one of them has a story to tell—stories about dedication and sacrifice.

Every day, I see my students work hard to overcome obstacles just to be in the classroom. Many of them work full time, have aging parents in need of care and attention, or are parents themselves. Often they contend with difficult economic realities. They are eager to learn, and many of them are the first members of their families to attend college. They persevere because they understand that getting an education will change their lives for the better. It will improve their job prospects and enrich their understanding of the world around them.

Community colleges can also serve as a gateway from a high-school diploma to a baccalaureate degree. They offer an affordable option for middle-class high-school students who want to attend a four-year college but cannot afford the tuition. The numbers tell the story: The average cost of tuition at a private four-year university is over $26,000 for the current academic year. At public four-year universities, the average is $7,000. Community-college tuition averages $2,500, presenting a far more affordable way to complete the first two years of a college education, especially when the credits earned on a community-college campus can often be transferred directly into four-year programs. It is not a coincidence that community colleges educate over 40 percent of all postsecondary students nationally.

For laid-off workers, community colleges offer job-certification programs that teach new skills and professions. Most people would be surprised to look at the catalog of an average community college today—they would find course work in a range of emerging health-care industries, training in cutting-edge technologies, offerings in architecture and green-building techniques, and classes in highly marketable job fields. For an immigrant or first-generation American, community college is often the place to begin a postsecondary education.

All of us have the opportunity to match the dedication of community-college students with a renewed commitment to ensuring their success. By working together, we can maximize the return on the new federal investment in students through Pell Grants, and in community colleges themselves, by modernizing the way classes are offered, ensuring easy transfer to four-year schools, and supporting other strategies for student success.

We know that education is the key to unlocking human potential. And we know that today, on community-college campuses across this country, millions of students are eager to build a more secure future for themselves, their families, and our country. We cannot—and we will not—let them down. As a member of the education community, I ask for your continued partnership in the months and years ahead as we continue to build support for community colleges and work to improve their offerings and outcomes. This is the moment for community colleges. Our work has just begun.

Jill Biden, a lifelong educator with a doctorate in education from the University of Delaware, teaches English at Northern Virginia Community College.

Jill Biden, Essay by Dr. Jill Biden in The Chronicle of Higher Education Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/351534

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In Support of our Ed.D. alumna, Dr. Jill Biden

In light of a recent opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal that focused on one of our most esteemed graduates, Dr. Jill Biden, questioning the legitimacy of doctoral credentials in higher education, we want to state very clearly:

The University of Delaware College of Education and Human Development unequivocally supports, promotes and is proud of the students and graduates of all of its programs, including the Doctor of Education (Ed.D.). UD students pursuing this degree reach the highest level of leadership in the professional field of education, going on to transform the delivery of services through educational systems that benefit society. The College is very proud of Dr. Jill Biden, a 2006 alumna of our doctoral program, who will soon become First Lady of the United States. She has consistently demonstrated her commitment to the value of education and equitable outcomes for students through her community college teaching. From their many contributions, whether in classrooms or at the highest levels of educational administration and policy, Ed.D. graduates enhance the learning and wellbeing of students and their families. With pride and appreciation, we salute all those who have earned their Doctor of Education degrees for their service and dedication to inspire and empower generations to come.

Gary T. Henry Dean, College of Education and Human Development University of Delaware

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clock This article was published more than  3 years ago

Jill Biden isn’t alone. Independent first ladies inevitably face criticism.

The sharpest blows have been dealt to first ladies who challenge their supposedly subordinate roles..

Nearly two weeks after an inane op-ed arguing that Jill Biden, who earned a doctorate in education, is not qualified to identify as a doctor, the future first lady’s professional status is somehow still under discussion. Tiresome as it is to learn that people are upset that a woman who holds an advanced degree doesn’t hide her accomplishments, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Indeed, whenever presidential spouses break barriers, they tend to face intense criticism.

The sharpest blows have been dealt to first ladies who challenge the norms of their prescribed subordinate roles. One of those norms is that first ladies leave their professional lives behind once their husbands are elected, which Jill Biden, impressively, has no plans to do. It might seem strange that her decision to keep her job as a community college professor while serving as first lady is such a novelty in 2020. After all, Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama each had graduate degrees and careers before entering the White House.

The hullabaloo about calling Jill Biden ‘doctor,’ explained

But the impossible contradiction inherent in the role of the first lady has made the path of least resistance — and, as my research demonstrates, most beneficial to the White House — one in which first ladies emphasize their status as benevolent volunteers, political outsiders and relatable mothers and wives, while promoting projects that cast the president’s policy agenda in a favorable light.

In short, the public wants active, accessible and transparent first ladies — they just don’t want them to have their own activities and agendas.

No first lady did more to normalize the image of an active working presidential spouse in the minds of Americans than Eleanor Roosevelt, who publicly and privately shaped many New Deal-era anti-poverty and civil rights programs. But in fighting to maintain the professional independence she enjoyed before Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election, Eleanor Roosevelt faced confrontations with journalists and even her husband, who requested that she stop teaching at the Todhunter School and resign her positions at the Democratic National Committee and the League of Women Voters once he was elected. It was even controversial that she drove her own car before and during her husband’s administration.

Hillary Clinton’s use of her maiden name , Rodham, and her infamous assertions of independence — whether she was invoking Tammy Wynette or cookie-baking housewives — were scrutinized throughout her husband’s political career. Clinton faced a similarly intense backlash when she was appointed to chair the president’s Health Care Task Force, despite her experience spearheading related efforts at the state level when she was first lady of Arkansas. Many attributed the administration’s failed push for health-care reform to Clinton’s leadership role, which fueled litigation over whether the task force qualified as an advisory group made up of full-time government employees.

Of course, not all first ladies have energetically pursued their own interests during their husbands’ administrations. Many have opted to focus on the social and ceremonial functions of their office, providing input and advice behind the scenes, or have appeared to shun politics altogether. They are criticized nonetheless.

Bess Truman and Melania Trump were reproached by the press and the public for their lack of public activity, drawing harsh comparisons to their trailblazing predecessors. Truman did not hold news conferences or give interviews, and Trump dramatically cut back the number of media appearances we have come to expect from first ladies seeking to buttress their husbands’ policy agendas and help them out of political messes.

If Trump had a first lady like Hillary Clinton, he'd be in better shape

But as my research shows, reacting to criticism by withdrawing from the spotlight has consequences for presidential administrations, their policy objectives and the many lives first ladies can improve by directing attention and resources to the issues they care about. Denying the White House opportunities to capitalize on the first lady’s popularity is difficult. Maintaining professional autonomy might be even harder.

Like her predecessors, Jill Biden is learning a tough lesson about our nation’s discomfort with — and confusion about — an accomplished woman in the White House. It is natural to react, as she already has, with surprise to such judgments. She might even reasonably wonder what she can do to avoid friction and keep the focus on her husband. But she can also take heart: History has eventually rewarded bold first ladies, embarrassed their detractors and recognized the work each presidential spouse has done to shape the contours of a thankless and peculiar job.

• What did Lincoln see in Mary Todd? Maybe that’s the wrong question.
• Jill Biden’s memoir — like Michelle Obama’s — is not meant to be political
• Today’s problems demand Eleanor Roosevelt’s solutions

Dr. Jill Biden’s main priority: Putting herself first as country flounders under Joe

A few months after her husband took office, Jill Biden posted a photo of herself sitting at a desk aboard Air Force One on social media looking very important.

“Prepping for the G7,” she wrote on her @FLOTUS “US Government Official” account, under the photo in which a scholarly “Dr. Jill” wearing reading glasses, pen in hand, is studying a thick ring binder of notes.

A flight jacket with the presidential seal is draped over the back of the chair, to leave you in no doubt about the power behind the throne.

As the 72-year-old wife of the oldest president in history, the effrontery of this spousal usurper on her first overseas trip was a portent of liberties to come.

Three years later, as her husband, now 81, grows increasingly befuddled , Dr. Jill is stepping up, doing solo campaign visits and TV appearances, weighing in on politics and polls as if it were she who is running for office.

And now we hear that the first lady has been pressuring her husband on Israel’s war on Hamas with these words: “Stop it. Stop it now, Joe.”

At a Ramadan event at the White House last week, Joe Biden reportedly told attendees about Jill’s sophisticated geopolitical advice.

The New York Times report was titled “Jill Biden Privately Urges an End to Conflict in Gaza.”

Lo and behold, over the weekend Israel withdrew all its ground troops from southern Gaza, a move characterized by the White House as a “rest and refit” for the troops.

No doubt Jill will chalk it up as a win for her wise counsel.

With Vice President Kamala Harris a perpetual drag on opinion polls , the Biden brains trust has decided the marginally less vacuous first lady is their “secret weapon” to win over suburban women on the campaign trail.

Last month she toured California making speeches comparing Florida to Nazi Germany and falsely claiming the state was banning books and forcing people not to say the word “gay.”

“History teaches us that democracies don’t disappear overnight,” said Dr. Jill. “They disappear slowly, subtly silently. A book ban, a court decision, a Don’t Say Gay law.”

At least she is not comparing Hispanic people to “breakfast tacos,” as she did once on a visit to San Antonio.

That did not go down well with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

“We are not tacos,” they said in a statement.

With all due respect, it was clear from her 2006 dissertation for her Ed. D that Jill Jacobs-Biden is not the sharpest pencil in the drawer.

“Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs,” contains such inspirational insights as: “In an average-sized class of twenty students at Delaware Tech, for example, most of the seats will be filled with young students who have just graduated from high school.”

The writing is assessed at a 12th-grade reading level by ChatGPT.

You wouldn’t want to go as far as her wayward stepson Hunter in critiquing her IQ. He once called her “a f–king moron,” in a series of texts he sent his uncle Jim.

Hunter claimed he told Jill: “The drunkest I’ve ever been is still smarter than you could ever even comprehend and you’re a shut [sic] grammar teacher that wouldn’t survive one class in a ivy graduate program.”

But Jill’s insistence on being called “Dr.,” although the honorific is usually reserved for medicos, or at least Ph.D.s, opens her to criticism, because status is an unbecoming obsession in the Biden household.

Her husband once explained why Jill pursued the degree: “She said, ‘I was so sick of the mail coming to Sen. and Mrs. Biden. I wanted to get mail addressed to Dr. and Sen. Biden.’ That’s the real reason she got her doctorate.”

Now, while her husband hides from the media, Dr. Jill appears on breakfast television denying his dismal poll numbers.

“No, he’s not losing in all the battleground states,’ she told “CBS Mornings” when asked about a poll showing Joe losing to Donald Trump in six of seven battleground states and tied in Wisconsin. “He’s coming up even or doing better . . . It’s obvious that Joe will win this election.”

Despite efforts by women’s magazines to soft-soap her image, it’s not clear she can help Joe out of the polling doldrums.

A lot of women look at Jill and wonder how she can allow her husband to keep bumbling around and falling over on camera.

A Nancy Reagan would have been by his side like a limpet ensuring his dignity was preserved or at least insisting that staffers take up the slack, instead of leaving the leader of the free world looking like an escapee from an aged care facility.

Caught on the tarmac once helping him get into a jacket when he seemed to have forgotten what armholes are, Jill looked more exasperated than solicitous. It is a difficult situation, for sure, but the wise counsel she should have given Joe was not to run for a second term.

Instead she continues to enable his behavior and revel in the perks, jetting around the world solo on Air Force One to a wedding in Jordan or to meet the president of Namibia.

Imagine the outcry if it were Melania Trump getting ideas above her station.

But no matter how ghastly Jill’s White House drag queen performances or freaky Christmas dancers, she rarely is criticized compared to her predecessor.

Jill’s compassion “superpower” recently was lauded by Women’s Health in a cover story titled “The Extraordinary Strength and Grace of Dr. Jill Biden.”

But there wasn’t much compassion for the seventh Biden grandchild, Navy Roberts, Hunter’s love child with a former strip club waitress, whom Jill and Joe refused to acknowledge for four years.

Jill wrote a children’s book dedicated to her grandchildren, all of whom she named — except Navy. She hung stockings at the White House each Christmas for six grandchildren and the pets — but not for Navy.

When Joe and Jill finally issued a statement to People last year as part of Hunter’s reduced child support settlement with Navy’s mom Lunden, they said: “Jill and I only want what is best for all of our grandchildren, including Navy.”

But that Christmas they broke with tradition and did not hang Santa stockings for any of their grandchildren at the White House, so Navy missed out again.

You would rather not criticize a first lady but she ought to stay in her lane.

Tucker Carlson Calls Jill Biden's Doctoral Dissertation 'Our National Shame'

General Assignment Reporter, HuffPost

Days after Tucker Carlson taunted Jill Biden for using the title Dr., the Fox News personality on Wednesday claimed to be doing his journalistic duty by critiquing the incoming first lady’s doctoral dissertation. (See the videos below.)

“Jill Biden’s doctoral dissertation is our national shame,” Carlson announced with shrill outrage on his prime time show.

Biden’s use of the title “Dr.” has stirred attention since a Wall Street Journal column asked her to stop using it because she is not a medical doctor. Former first lady Michelle Obama and others have sprung to her defense , suggesting the article was sexist.

Carlson, who snidely compared Biden to “Dr. Pepper” and “Dr. Bill Cosby ” earlier this week, tore apart the 2006 academic paper that presumably earned her a doctorate in education from University of Delaware.

“We’re gonna give it to you in a diagnosis: Dr. Jill needs reading glasses,” Carlson said. “Either that or she’s borderline illiterate. There are typos everywhere, including in the first graph of the introduction. Dr. Jill can’t write ― she can’t really think clearly either. Parts of the dissertation seem to be written in a foreign language using English words. They’re essentially pure nonsense, like pig Latin or dogs barking. The whole thing is just incredibly embarrassing. And not simply to poor, illiterate Jill Biden, but to the college that considered this crap scholarship. Embarrassing, in fact, to our entire system of higher education, to the nation itself. Jill Biden’s doctoral dissertation is our national shame.”

Carlson also gleefully pointed out mathematical errors in her paper, a purported copy of which can be seen here .

“If you dare to notice that Dr. Jill isn’t a super genius, you hate all women,“ Carlson said sarcastically. “You’re a dangerous misogynist.”

The whole segment begins at 15:05:

H/T Media Matters

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