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never trust an academic from UEA!

9 May 2017: The Federalist: Attack Sebastian Gorka’s Ideas, Not His Credentials Or Person
By Kevin Stuart
(Kevin E. Stuart is the executive director of the Austin Institute. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied public law and political philosophy, a master of sciences from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge)

A little online digging was all it took to show Reynolds’s assertions to be unsubstantiated. The search began at Corvinus University of Budapest’s library, Gorka’s alma mater, where online versions of both his dissertation and a shorter summary are available. Reynolds directs much of his criticism at the qualification of external reviewers listed in the summary, and he assumes they were the only reviewers.

But why assume that? Labeling them “external” already implies they’re not the only reviewers and, indeed, a current university policy document requires a committee with internal members, external members, and a public defense. Reynolds would need to know the exact composition of the committee to reach his conclusion, and he offers no evidence of such knowledge. It seems to me before you try to destroy a man’s career, this is the sort of detail you make sure you get right...

Gorka’s dissertation document is 240 pages total, with 264 footnotes in 195 pages of the main text, all fairly standard. His superviser, Lánczi András, is a professor at Corvinus University, head (rektora in Hungarian) of the Political Science Institute, and a former Fulbright research grant recipient in the United States. Those are standard, even impressive, credentials and certainly pass the initial smell test.

There was also a second adviser, professor Stephen Sloan, who is a distinguished fellow for the Global Perspective Office at the University of Central Florida (UCF) where he was previously Lawrence J. Chastang Distinguished Professor of Terrorism Studies. Sloan’s PhD is in comparative politics from New York University (NYU), a university of considerable prestige.
Gorka’s dissertation identifies Sloan’s affiliation as Temple University, also a top research university. Around the time Gorka completed his dissertation, a press release from Syracuse University identified Sloan as “a terrorism expert from the University of Central Florida and Temple University,” so nothing appears to be amiss there, either...

Either Reynolds has blundered rather embarrassingly, or (much more likely) this is a mendacious ideological attack—and a sloppy one at that...
http://thefederalist.com/2017/05/09/attack-sebastian-gorkas-ideas-not-credentials-person/