An Opinion Writer Argued Jill Biden Should Drop the ‘Dr.’ (Few Were Swayed.)

Still, Ms. Martin said, “I don’t tell people what to call themselves and I’m aware that women often have trouble with people who don’t respect their credentials.”

(The New York Times’s house style allows for anyone with an earned doctorate, such as a Ph.D. or Ed.D., to be identified by the title on subsequent references, provided it is “germane to the holder’s primary current occupation.”)

Mr. Epstein, 83, an essayist, author and former editor of The American Scholar, has been accused of advancing offensive views before. In a 1970 essay about homosexuality in Harper’s Magazine, he called gay people “cursed” and “an affront to our rationality.”

“If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality” off the face of the earth, he wrote.

Writing in The Washington Examiner in 2015, he lamented that the essay had often been mentioned — usually by “professional gay liberationists” — any time that he writes something controversial.

“My only hope now is that, on my gravestone, the words Noted Homophobe aren’t carved,” Mr. Epstein wrote.

In his piece this week in The Journal, Mr. Epstein said that he had taught at Northwestern University for 30 years, even though he held only a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Chicago.

Addressing Dr. Biden, he wrote, “Your degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title ‘Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs.’”