I totally agree that this is the fairest read:
‘Indeed. I think the best possible case for DB's credibility is that she in fact knows nothing about academia, did have a brief visiting professorship (that could be checked by a FOI to the institution), and doesn't understand how professor titles work.’
And because she doesn’t understand she’s done anything wrong she is outraged at it being called into question.
I wonder if anyone will be setting her right over the weekend and what she might do with that knowledge.
The less fair is that she has accrued an enormous sense of herself over the years, faked the title here and there, enjoyed how it feels wearing it and feels she deserves the title even though she made it up in the first instance.
The less fair version chimes with the aberrant use of Dr some have found in, I think, companies house. You are never offered that title as a visitor, of course, so she has to have selected that on the form’s pull down menu and, perhaps because no one called her on it, never corrected it and then thought why not go for Professor although it is clear from the digging above that she didn’t enter that from the honorific pull down options but in the box for ‘name’, first accidentally putting it in the middle name box and then in the fist name box before Deborah.
I’m beginning to think she might not even have had a visiting professorship formally speaking but had been, perhaps, invited in to give a talk or offer mentorship and someone referred to her that way.
it is interesting in that publication on mentorship someone found that she is named Prof Debbie. So perhaps a casual use by students adopting Americanisms became what she imagined a right to use.