“Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr’ before your name? ‘Dr Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic. Joseph Epstein in his opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) after terming the next US First Lady as “kiddo”, asked if she could drop the title from her name. His stand? Well, he reasoned no one should call themselves “Dr” unless they have a medical degree.  

Jill might not have a medical degree, but she is an educator, who has taken thousands of students under the umbrella of her able guidance.

The future First Lady has a bachelor’s degree, two master’s degrees, and a doctorate of education from the University of Delaware in 2007 with her excellence and grit. 

Jill Jacobs, born in June 1951, was the oldest of five sisters. Although born in New Jersey, she grew up in the Philadelphia suburb of Willow Grove.

In 1972, Joe Biden lost his first wife and his one-year-old daughter in a car accident (his sons Beau and Hunter both survived the accident).

Three years later, Jill says she was introduced to Joe through his brother. While Joe was a senator then, she was still in college.

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“I had been dating guys in jeans and clogs and T-shirts, he came to the door and he had a sport coat and loafers, and I thought: ‘God, this is never going to work, not in a million years.”

“He was nine years older than I am! But we went out to see ‘A Man and a Woman’ at the movie theatre in Philadelphia, and we really hit it off,” she had once told Vogue.  

The couple, finally, married in 1977 and four years later their daughter, Ashley, was born.

Now 69, Jill has spent decades working as a teacher. At the start, she taught English and reading in high schools for 13 years and taught at a psychiatric hospital for adolescents.

And since 2009, she has been a professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College and is thought to be the first wife of a vice-president to hold a paying job during her husband’s tenure.

During the 2020 Democratic convention, Jill gave her address from her old classroom at Delaware’s Brandywine High School, where she taught English from 1991 to 1993.

“Teaching is not what I do. It’s who I am,” she tweeted in August.

Previously, she held the title of Second Lady while her husband served as vice-president to Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017.

During this period, her work included promoting community colleges, advocating for military families and raising awareness about breast cancer prevention.

She also launched the Joining Forces initiative with First Lady Michelle Obama, which included helping military veterans and their families access education programmes and employment resources.

Jill has vehemently criticised the Iraq Wars and started wearing a Blue Star Mothers Club pin during her campaigns in recognition of Beau Biden’s deployment to Iraq.  

In 2012, she published a children’s book called ‘Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops’ based on her granddaughter’s experience of being in a military family.

During the build-up to the 2020 presidential elections, she was a prominent supporter of her husband, appearing alongside him and holding events and fundraisers.

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A Town and Country magazine headline quite rightly declared that “Jill Biden might just be Joe Biden’s greatest political asset.”  

During the 2020 convention, Jill talked about her family and the struggles they have faced.

“I know that if we entrust this nation to Joe, he will do for your family what he did for ours – bring us together and make us whole, carry us forward in our time of need, keep the promise of America for all of us,” she said.

Now on January 20 when her husband takes office as the President of the United States, Jill will become the first spouse since Barbara Bush to hold the positions of both Second Lady and First Lady.

She has reiterated that she plans to continue teaching, which would make her the first wife of a sitting US president to hold a paying job outside the White House. 

To denounce the title of ‘Dr’ held by Jill is not only a great disservice to her years of dedication, grit and sacrifice but also to all the academics and their contribution to the betterment of the planet.