I have watched the politics involving Ph.D. since I was 14 in Boston, where I become aware just how stupid the politics can be. True, a PhD represents a certain amount of work that the holder can feel good about.  However, having done a Masters and PhD Linguistics & Anthropology in 4 years at indiana Univesity 25 years ago, I think that they are given far more credit than they deserve. Have a reasonable IQ, determination, and a higher than normal tolerance for academic games, and you, too, can more than likely get one of the damn things. In the end, they pay off well. But they don’t make the holder a ‘better”, ‘smarter” person than non-holders, don’t mean the holders can be elitist and superior. (I know how institutions often recognize the degree, and even received a 15% increase on the base of a job in a hospital because I had that PhD in social sciences, even though it had nothing to do with being a risk manager. Go figure.) Anyway, I saw dad in Harvard run afoul of this nasty elitist mentality, and it made me want to cry or fight the man.
       The man this time was Raymond Painter (who had a PhD) and who was hired in the Ornithology section of MCZ.  I had the good fortune -I mean that- of being hired to work for him a full summer cleaning bird skeletons that had never been cleaned, some of which were old and some of which were famous, e.g. I got to clean the last two Passenger Pigeons in the US. And I got to work on a dodo skeleton. No resenblance to Raymond.
         One of dad’s assignments was to restore and repair the public exhibits on the third floor, some of which naturally included  specimens of Class Aves.  As a side effect, Dick and I were hired to clean up after dad, cleaning glass windows, scraping off paint, cleaning the floors and so on. Grunt work but it was money and it was in an interesting setting. One of dad’s nicest restorations was an exhibit of hawks and eagles. He had done a great job of cleaning their feathers and positioning them on believable branches in believable positions. It was a deep exhibit which gave him scope to do something artistic that would increase the beauty of the display.
         He set up his small air brush, which you of course know is nothing of the kind. It is a little air gun with a funnel filled with paint that was sprayed out through the nozzle in a fine spray when the trigger was pressed which allowed air to blow through a venturi type set-up. It creates wonderful shaded patterns adn designs.  As a background for these grand birds, he air brushed in an expanse of pale blue sky which was populated with kleenex clouds. It was just gorgeous and I was proud of him.
         Sometime later I understood at home that something terrible had happened.  The particulars aren’t available here, but the essence is. Dad came home just destroyed.  It was one of those nights that mom held him in her arms while he wept over his shock and anger at being treated so badly. What had happened was that this PdD doctor who walked around in wing tips, Brooks Brother shirts, ties, the works, decided for reasons that could not have been reasons at all, decided that he did not like the airbrushed fluffy sky. They had words about it and I suppose that dad the artist actually let his tongue get away with himself. That happened more than once. He was naturally right that this fluffy blue sky was precisely what was needed to set off the large birds, one of which had wings extended, but Raymond knew better. I can imagine what happened.
       Initially, Painter may have just remarked something about how he wasn’t quite satisfied with the blue sky. That would be a dangerous thing to say to an artist. That is what dad was, an artist. The sooner one understands that he was an artist above all else at all times, the sooner s/he will understand many things about how he worked. Well, Painter ol’ boy didn’t know that. When Alvin flared as I think he would, Painter would have been a bit intimidated, being a prissy, privileged prep school product, by being confronted in his estimation, but this longshoreman thug.  So he planted his feet, got his gorge up and dug in. Now it was a bare contest of wills, and guess what. The boss may not always be right but the boss is always the boss. So the boss finally said, “Just change it. I want it painted pumpkin orange.”
         That is what dad had to do. There was no recourse. The only authority on the matter was Painter. And it wasn’t worth escalating the thing anyway. How trivial. But it wasn’t trivial to dad. And it wasn’t trivial to me. That is how I learned first hand at age 15 how elitist and stupid PhDs can be, and I fear that it is a substnatial percentage of them that revel in being “Doctors”.  Oh my oh me, Doctor.  Grow up. 
         It was ironic, then, that years later BYU would decide to grant him a, gyou guessed it, an honorary PhD. He did receive it and he loved it. He did. In spite of despising those ones which were elitist, he loved being able to sign himself “Doctor”.                                    

So he got the PhD and did morework to earn it than those who claim to have “earned” degrees. That is he irony of the whole thing.  It’s true that some honorary degrees are granted in return for a money donation so don’t mean much in terms of what the person did, but in this case, Alvin did far more work to receive this thing than the ‘real’ phds who were just students having a grand time in libraries and parties on the weekends. I know. I been there in a real universit

• Academy of Excellence Honorary Doctorate G.E.D. Explorer’s Club

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