Is Sebastian Gorka’s PhD A Fraud?

By Dave Goldiner April 27, 2017

“Dr. Gorka”? Not so fast.

Sebastian Gorka has already come under fire for his ties to a far right-wing Hungarian group that was allied to the Nazis.

Now tough questions are being asked about the controversial White House anti-terrorism official’s academic credentials.

“Gorka is… a snake-oil salesman whose supposed Ph.D dissertation would have never passed muster in America or Britain,” writes Andrew Reynolds, a University of North Carolina political scientist. “To put the cherry on the cake was approved by an fraudulent panel of examiners.”

Gorka, who grew up in Britan and moved to his father’s homeland of Hungary, was awarded his PhD in 2007 by a place called Corvinus University in Budapest, a little-known institution that Reynolds says has no international profile.

Reynolds says Gorka’s dissertation is more like an extended Islamophobic rant with precious little academic research to back it up.

He provided approval letters from three referees, but two of them don’t possess doctorates themselves, which is highly unusual.

The third stamp of approval came from a family friend who is also a parliamentary leader of a far-right Hungarian party who recently called for pig’s heads to be impaled on border fences to keep out Muslim refugees.

Dave Goldiner is the Forward’s director of digital media. Dave is a veteran journalist who has spent two decades working at newspapers in the United States and Africa. A native New Yorker, Goldiner wrote for the New York Daily News, where he covered some of the biggest stories of our time, including the attacks of September 11, along with thousands of stories of hope and heartbreak. He also studied and worked in Southern Africa and has written for publications in South Africa and Zimbabwe. He holds masters degrees in journalism and public administration from Columbia University. Dave can be reached at [email protected], or follow him on Twitter @davegoldiner