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| Sgt. York, memorialized |
CBC News continues to report on the growing scandal of the history Ph.D the University of New Brunswick granted to American Christian-nationalist extremist and ex-soldier Douglas Mastriano, currently running for governor of Pennsylvania. [Note: We first covered this topic a month ago.]
UNB historian Jeffrey Brown, who opposed granting the degree in 2013, describes Mastriano's study of American First World War hero Alvin York as ascribing York's achievements to divine intervention.
In one example, on Page 260, Mastriano writes: "The idea that York survived the carnage because of Divine Intervention also speaks of a miracle."
Brown said that approach just isn't scholarly.
"It wasn't so much, 'Sergeant York reported that,' or, 'York believed that,' as it was, 'God talked to York,'" Brown said in an interview.
"That's where Mastriano wanted to go with it: that this guy was literally directed by God to begin fighting people. That would be righteous. That's what God wanted."
Alexander Panetta's CBC article reports Brown's concerns about why UNB approved the dissertation:
The school, he says, has a good relationship with the military, and let Mastriano through to avoid disrupting that.
James Gregory, an American scholar of York, is reported as having found misleading citations throughout Mastriano's work.
It's rampant with fake footnotes, he says, meaning the paper often makes a claim, cites a footnote to back it up, then, when you actually go check the source mentioned in the footnote, it says something else.
UNB grad students are noticing:
Doing my PhD in history at UNB, the last thing I expected was for my department to become embroiled in US politics. But the last month has been a rollercoaster of emotion because the department, and by extension the university, is more concerned with saving face (1
— Richard Yeomans (@richrray) October 5, 2022
