UNB launches review of Trump ally's PhD after plagiarism allegations emerge

The University of New Brunswick is conducting an independent review of how it awarded a PhD to Doug Mastriano, a retired Army colonel and prominent Trump ally, after scholars raised serious questions about the academic integrity of his 2013 dissertation. The scrutiny has put the university in an uncomfortable position, forcing it to confront what appears to be a significant failure in its doctoral review process.

Mastriano was largely unknown outside Pennsylvania politics until he became a vocal advocate for overturning Trump's 2020 election loss. In May, with Trump's backing, he won the Republican nomination for Pennsylvania governor, bringing national attention to his far-right campaign. But in September, when the Associated Press reported that scholars had identified plagiarism allegations and factual errors in his doctoral work, the focus shifted sharply to his academic credentials. Mastriano has not publicly responded to the allegations, and his offices in Pennsylvania did not return calls seeking comment.

The dissertation, completed in 2013, examined the life and military exploits of Alvin York, a highly decorated First World War infantryman. Jeffrey Brown, a history professor at UNB who served on Mastriano's examining board, said he raised red flags about the work from the beginning. The core problem, Brown explained, was that Mastriano's 500-page paper leaned heavily on a 1928 autobiography of York that other historians have criticized as oversimplified and hagiographic. Brown also identified serious issues with an archaeological dig Mastriano had conducted in France before starting his PhD program. Mastriano claimed the excavation had located the exact battlefield where York single-handedly defeated an entire German machine-gun battalion in October 1918. But in 2008, two qualified experts—geoscientist Thomas Nolan at Middle Tennessee State University and historian Michael Birdwell at Tennessee Tech University—had already published findings placing the battlefield at a different location. Mastriano's dissertation made no mention of this competing scholarship.

In a February 2013 assessment, Brown explicitly told Mastriano to acknowledge the work of Nolan and Birdwell. When Mastriano submitted his final revisions four months later, Brown wrote to the dissertation supervisor, Marc Milner, saying he was considering removing his name from the paper entirely. "The charge of dishonesty, in fact, is everywhere in the letters of concern we have both received from people who believe that Doug's dissertation should not be accepted by UNB," Brown wrote. According to Brown, Milner then told him his input was no longer needed because the examining board had sufficient members to proceed. Brown expected his name would be removed from the final version, but it was not. Mastriano received his PhD later that year, and the dissertation became the basis for a 2014 book published by the University Press of Kentucky.

The problems did not end there. James Gregory, an instructor and PhD candidate at the University of Oklahoma, became concerned about Mastriano's work after encountering a questionable citation in the 2014 book. Gregory submitted a list of 15 issues to the publisher in January 2021 and requested the original dissertation from UNB. He was told the paper had been placed under embargo until 2030—a restriction that violated UNB's own policy allowing embargoes of only four years. When the dissertation was finally released in August 2022, Gregory discovered that Mastriano had appended a list of 21 corrections. But after reviewing the full document, Gregory identified what he described as 213 instances of academic misconduct. In one example, Gregory points to a passage describing weather conditions in France's Argonne forest during an investigation into York's battlefield heroics. The cited source, Gregory says, is merely a telegram containing a brief travel itinerary—not the detailed meteorological account Mastriano's text suggests.

On campus, the silence from university leadership has deepened the frustration. Richard Yeomans, a PhD candidate in UNB's history department, said graduate students are shocked that the department has offered no public response since the story became international news. "The university has chosen to save face rather than come to terms with what this means," Yeomans said. "A certain level of trust has been breached." Graduate students raised their concerns with Lisa Todd, the chair of the history department, but Todd did not respond to requests for an interview.

In early October, UNB issued a statement acknowledging that the allegations were causing "concern or confusion" among students, alumni, and the public. The university said it would review its internal processes to ensure its PhD standards remained rigorous, and that two independent academics would conduct the review. But the statement included no deadline and gave no indication whether the results would be made public. Marc Milner, the dissertation supervisor, could not be reached for comment. Gregory, who is publishing a book titled "Unravelling the Myth of Sgt. Alvin York" in December, said the university faces a clear choice: either defend Mastriano's dissertation as meeting its standards, or take action. "There's no way this should have passed," he said.