Sorefingers,

sorry to crash your prof-bashing session, and to rib you about your grammar and spelling to boot! But you're a big person and I know you can take it. I do have a few serious comments, however:

Few PhDs (at least in the US) insist on, or even like, being called "Dr." Since we are not medical doctors, it causes unnecessary confusion. Most of us prefer our students to call us "professor" or "Mr./Ms." or in many cases these days, just by our first names. And people outside our classes? Rarely "doctor." Still, the name "doctor" originally signified an academic degree, not a medical one. So we are technically as entitled to it as anyone. Lawyers in the US also technically have doctorates (JDs), but they never call themselves "doctor."

Among communities where advanced degrees are unusual, or in situations where prestige is important, many people with non-medical degrees will affect the title "Dr." Martin Luther King springs to mind...would you giggle at him as easily as at the "me, but mine is educational" guy? Also, within universities, when a person has an administrative rather than academic role, it is common to use "doctor." This is because "professor" is not accurate for these people, but the doctorate does carry connotations of achievement and rank within the university.

In some cases, people who receive honorary doctorates (which universities give out essentially for PR reasons, to honor VIPs) will even call themselves "Dr." including at times the bluegrass luminary Ralph Stanley.

Intelligence is surely separate from education. There is no doubt that there are some not-so-smart PhDs, and some very smart high school dropouts. But this does not mean that PhDs are identical as a group to everyone else. For one thing, getting a PhD, especially in the humanities, does require highly-developed skills of research and writing. If we take a humanities PhD, and (s)he knows nothing about, say, early Greek farming techniques, with access to a library (s)he can find out the current state of knowledge much faster and more accurately than the average person on the street. So when talking about arcane historical subjects, of which nobody is alive to really have firsthand knowledge, I would tend to trust the PhD. Not that we don't sometimes misremember or misconstrue, but we do have intense training in how to find stuff out, and how to separate good, well-supported research from outlandish claims with little evidence behind them.

Also, I believe [disclaimer--I have not actually done the research!] that George W. Bush has an MBA, not an MA. This is a Business Administration degree, generally considered a professional and not an academic degree. Business schools sometimes do offer PhDs as well. Newt Gingrich, however, has an honest-to-goodness PhD in History.