I’m not sure what to make of the NYT report “Mastriano’s War College Stint, Once a Selling Point, Comes Under Fire.”
The crowning chapter of Doug Mastriano’s military career — a stint on the faculty of the U.S. Army War College — has flared up in his campaign for Pennsylvania governor.
Two former professors at the War College in Carlisle, Pa., publicly declared Mr. Mastriano unfit for public office. A photograph surfaced of Mr. Mastriano posing in a Confederate uniform with other faculty. And Mr. Mastriano’s Ph.D. dissertation has been criticized as deeply flawed, with a former academic adviser saying his doctorate rests “on very shaky grounds.”
Mr. Mastriano — the Republican nominee for governor in a crucial battleground state — received his Ph.D. in history from the University of New Brunswick in Canada in 2013, the year after he joined the faculty of the War College. His research focused on a World War I hero, Sgt. Alvin York, who credited his exploits killing and capturing German soldiers to divine intervention and who inspired the 1941 Gary Cooper movie “Sergeant York.”
“I think Mastriano really likes that story because York became the kind of spiritual warrior that Mastriano sees himself as being,” said Jeffrey Scott Brown, a history professor at the University of New Brunswick who advised Mr. Mastriano but objected to his academic techniques. Dr. Brown’s criticisms included Mr. Mastriano’s amateur archaeological sleuthing on a French battlefield and his credulity in accepting divine intervention to explain Sergeant York’s heroics.
“I’ve been concerned about this for a decade,” Dr. Brown said in an interview.
[…]
Two former faculty colleagues said his role as a candidate and state senator in two areas — spreading lies about the results of the 2020 election, and marching on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — violated his military oath.
“The officer corps is sworn to defend the Constitution rather than any one person or president,” Tami Davis Biddle, who was chair of the War College’s faculty council, wrote in an opinion article for a Harrisburg newspaper. “None of its members is entitled to toy with insurrection, treat Jan. 6 as legitimate protest, or follow election deniers who would undercut our most important political institutions.”
In an interview, Dr. Biddle, who retired last year, said: “If you’re going to say the 2020 election was won by Trump, that was simply not true. To lobby for keeping Trump in office when he had lost an election was outrageous.”
[…]
Another former War College faculty member, Rick Coplen, a West Point graduate and a combat veteran, said Mr. Mastriano had tried to “undermine our democracy.”
Mr. Coplen was a professor of economic development at the War College for a decade. He accused Mr. Mastriano of “helping former President Trump in trying to overthrow the legitimate, clearly understood and agreed-upon electoral results.” His concerns were reported earlier by The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Mr. Coplen ran unsuccessfully this year in the Democratic primary for a congressional seat in South Central Pennsylvania. He said his criticism of Mr. Mastriano was not motivated by partisanship.
“This is about the fundamental stuff of American democracy,” he said in an interview. “When I was 18 years old, like my fellow West Point cadets, I raised my right hand and pledged the same oath to the U.S. Constitution. That’s most important, regardless of party.”
Dr. Brown, at the University of New Brunswick, was a member of the examining board for Mr. Mastriano’s dissertation.
He objected to Mr. Mastriano’s field research in France that claimed to precisely identify the location of Sergeant York’s heroics, which Dr. Brown said was conducted amateurishly with members of Mr. Mastriano’s son’s Boy Scout troop. He also objected to assertions in the dissertation that Sergeant York was protected by the hand of God. On Page 223 of his dissertation, Mr. Mastriano writes, “The idea that York survived the carnage because of Divine Intervention also speaks of a miracle.”
Dr. Brown said such a statement was unscholarly. “You’re allowed to discuss someone’s belief — that York believed there was literal divine intervention,” Dr. Brown said. “But to present it as settled historical fact is not acceptable for professional historians.”
Another scholar, James Gregory, a history graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, has identified what he says are multiple errors in Mr. Mastriano’s treatise. After he reported 35 problematic passages to the University of New Brunswick, Mr. Mastriano added 21 corrections in 2021. But Mr. Gregory insisted there were many more issues that, in his view, added up to academic dishonesty.
Dr. Brown shared documents he wrote in 2013 spelling out his own objections, including an email he said was sent to Mr. Mastriano’s dissertation supervisor raising “serious misgivings.” Nonetheless, the Ph.D. was granted. Dr. Brown’s name appears on the dissertation, which, he said, surprised him because he had been told he was no longer needed on the evaluation committee.
The University of New Brunswick, which released the dissertation last month under pressure, said in a statement it could not discuss Mr. Mastriano’s degree without his consent. It added that two independent academics would review the university’s procedures to ensure that its granting of doctorates meets “the highest standard.”
Mastriano is a right-wing kook who’s unfit to be governor of Pennsylvania. Given that he’s been trailing his Democratic opponent by double digits in the polls for months, it seems the people of Pennsylvania agree. We’ll know for sure in a couple of weeks.
That said, I’m deeply uncomfortable with all of this as an academic.
I applaud James Gregory, a scholar with no connection to Mastriano, unearthing problems with his dissertation and reporting them to the degree-granting institution. Especially since the dissertation has since been turned into a book at the University Press of Kentucky and is likely to be cited by future scholars.
It is simply unprofessional in the highest order, though, for a member of his committee to go to the press and argue that the credential shouldn’t have been earned. That he considers the fieldwork amateurish and is aghast that Mastriano attributed York’s actions to divine intervention is interesting; indeed, I agree with him on the latter (I don’t have enough information to judge the former). But going public this way—in the context of a political campaign almost a decade later—brings every degree awarded by his department into question. It’s frankly bizarre behavior.
I’m also somewhat uncomfortable with Biddle and Coplen coming out as they have against a former colleague. It would be one thing if they had some new insight to share based on Mastriano’s conduct at the War College. But they are simply leveraging the fact that they overlapped on the faculty to gain traction to give their opinion on his recent actions in support of the Big Lie. They have no more expertise to comment on that than any other citizen.
Again, Mastriano seems like a nut to me. It continues to shock me that people like this can rise to colonel (or three-star general, in the case of Michael Flynn) in our Army. And it saddens me that these traits are now enhancing, if not required, to gain the Republican Party nomination for major office.
