As recently as 2011, Tim Walz claimed in official biographies for his campaign and congressional office that he was on the verge of completing a doctorate in education, a decade after he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota in the small town of Winona.
The university, however, told the Washington Free Beacon that its last records indicating Walz was an active student are dated to 2004.
“We can confirm that Governor Walz attended Saint Mary’s from 2001-2004 in our doctorate level Ed.D. program,” the school’s communications director, Ashly Bissen, told the Free Beacon. “He did not complete the degree program.”
Walz would nonetheless claim through 2011 that he was an active student “nearly finished with his doctorate at St. Mary’s University in Winona, Minnesota,” as his congressional biography put it, four years after he arrived on Capitol Hill.
That claim, like so many others Walz has made about his biography over his political career, was at best a stretch and at worst a lie, the same sort of résumé padding characteristic of other fibs and misrepresentations Walz has made throughout his political career.
But academic dishonesty stands out, including exaggerations. Rep. Andy Ogles (R., Tenn.) last year apologized for stating he had a degree in economics when he’d only taken one economics class and gotten a “C.” The CEO of Yahoo was forced out in 2012 after it was discovered he lied about majoring in both computer science and accounting in college. He only majored in accounting.
Walz, who’d been teaching high school for over a decade, started a course of study at St. Mary’s in 2001, enrolling in a “cohort doctoral program,” a second spokeswoman told the Free Beacon. He stopped taking classes at St. Mary’s in 2004 and never earned a degree, the spokeswoman said.
“Governor Walz was enrolled as part of a cohort doctoral program from 2001-2004 and has not taken classes at Saint Mary’s since that time,” said Michelle Rovang, the school’s vice president of communications.
Walz earned a master’s degree in “experiential education” (an academic term for hands-on learning, a feature of Walz’s work as a teacher) from Minnesota State University, Mankato, in 2002. St. Mary’s told the Free Beacon that the school accepted Walz into its doctoral program on the condition that he’d earn his master’s at nearby Minnesota State.
Getting a master’s degree is an early step toward earning a Ph.D., which requires years of additional study and research and can also require teaching college-level courses and successfully defending a dissertation.
Nonetheless, when Walz ran for Congress in 2006, roughly two years after his last recorded year in the St. Mary’s doctoral program, he portrayed himself on the campaign trail and in Congress as an active student “nearly finished” with his Ph.D. A 2006 voter guide published by the Minnesota Star Tribune indicated that Walz’s Ph.D. was “in progress.”
That year, Waltz defeated a five-term Republican incumbent, Gil Gutknecht, who recently told the Free Beacon, when asked about Walz, that “all political figures are guilty of a bit of puffery. He frequently went well beyond that into prevarication.”
Indeed, as a sitting member of Congress, Walz continued to claim for years that he was finishing his doctoral degree. His congressional website made those claims through 2011, an archived version shows. But by 2012, Walz had removed all references to his impending doctorate from his congressional biography.
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