So this newly-minted doctor posted a picture of herself and her thesis on Twitter on November 27.

She was immediately inundated with a bunch of hateful, hurtful comments about her, her thesis topic, the title (and it’s “wordiness” or “obscureness”), her choice of field (English Lit), and a bunch of other shit.

I have thoughts.

Here they are:

To the “this is a worthless and unimportant topic and worthless and unimportant degree” crowd: the advancement of human knowledge – which includes exploring the products of creativity, such as literature – is never worthless. Just because you may not find it interesting or too specific or too “why would I ever need this?” doesn’t make it worthless. Dr. Louks has made a contribution to human understanding. What have you done today?

To the “PhDs should only be awarded in the sciences” crowd: Shifting focus completely away from the arts and humanities is what’s getting us people who don’t know the original work of The Odyssey and instead see info on the upcoming 2026 “The Odyssey” and say “how convenient that they named the main character after the name of the movie!!!!1!”

To the “this is way too specific and niche” crowd: y’all…y’all don’t know what a PhD is, do you? They’re supposed to be super niche. They’re supposed to be super specific. Hell, I did my master’s thesis on failings of specific fit indices used in structural equation modeling. That shit’s niche, yo, and is probably as obscure (or maybe even more so) to outsiders to the field as Dr. Louks’ topic is to people outside of her field. Here is a visual I showed my ASHA students when talking about what a PhD entails. You should check it out.

Edit: Dr. Louks is now affectionately known as the “smell doctor” on Twitter by her supporters and I see references to her almost every day on there. So yeah, no impact whatsoever.