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.
Walz’s years of misstatements about his academic background are part and parcel of a pattern of prevarication that has followed him from the high school classroom to Capitol Hill to the Minnesota governor's mansion—and now, should Kamala Harris prevail in November, to the Naval Observatory. The misrepresentations, embellishments, and falsehoods have been carefully woven together to create a portrait of a patriot-scholar and exemplary product of the American heartland.
Walz boasted during his 2006 campaign launch that he was "named the Outstanding Young Nebraskan by the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce," a false claim that the Chamber's then-president demanded that Walz correct. Walz’s campaign manager at the time claimed Walz had won an award from the Junior Chamber of Commerce and attributed the error to a "typographical error."
Walz also made the exaggerated claim during his maiden congressional run that in 1989, he’d "earned the title of Nebraska Citizen-Soldier of the Year." In fact, he was one of 52 reservists invited to a brunch for recipients of the "Citizens Soldiers Awards," an event sponsored by a mysterious civic group called Ak-Sar-Ben, which is "Nebraska" spelled backward.
Walz further stated that his yearlong teaching stint in China came through a program at Harvard University for which he was hand-picked by the school. While the program was founded by Harvard undergraduates, it does not appear to have ever been officially associated with the Ivy League school.
Walz has also lied about his own family, telling MSNBC in July that his "two beautiful children" would not be alive without in vitro fertilization. His kids were not conceived through IVF but rather through a non-controversial, far less costly, and far less invasive procedure known as intrauterine insemination. The lie gives Walz, a middle-aged man, a personal connection to the battle for so-called women’s reproductive rights that Democrats see as a winning issue this year.
Walz's most controversial claims, however, pertain to his time in the Army National Guard.
Walz, who served in the guard for 24 years, has said he carried guns "in war." His campaign promoted news stories that described him as one of a "number of veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq" running for Congress.
But Walz never served in Afghanistan. While he spent time in Norway and Italy working in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, he never saw combat and never set foot in the war theater. When his National Guard battalion was being eyed for a deployment to Iraq, Walz issued a March 2005 campaign press release pledging to "serve if called upon" and run for Congress from the Middle East. But two months later, in May, he retired from the guard. By July, his old unit received notice of the deployment, and Walz never joined them in Iraq.
It's unclear how close Walz was to achieving his doctorate and whether he formally withdrew from St. Mary's. His time at St. Mary's overlapped with his deployment to Italy, which came in 2003 and concluded in 2004. Walz had taken five years, from 1997 to 2002, to complete his master's degree at Minnesota State, according to the New York Times. He was also teaching school at the time.
The current iteration of the doctoral program Walz enrolled in can be completed in as little as four years, according to St. Mary's, and the school requires students to complete it in eight years. Rovang said students "do not need to formally withdraw from a graduate or doctorate program." She also said the program "has changed a great deal" since Walz was enrolled and declined to provide program details from that time.
The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Though Walz's master's degree is not in question, some of the details surrounding his higher education experience have been misreported, including by Walz himself.
Walz has repeatedly said, including in his congressional bios, that he received his master's degree in education in 2001, a claim that media outlets such as CNN, the Washington Post, and Politico have echoed. Minnesota State University, Mankato media relations director Dan Benson, however, says the school conferred Walz the degree on May 10, 2002.
"I, too, have seen media reports that list 2001 as the year Walz received his master's degree," Benson told the Free Beacon, "but per Minnesota State Mankato records, that is wrong."
"For media members who have asked, the date of May 10, 2002, has been provided as the date Walz earned his master of science degree in experiential education. University records show that Walz's last day as an enrolled student at Minnesota State University, Mankato, was July 26, 2002."
That means Walz was enrolled simultaneously at Minnesota State and St. Mary's, which told the Free Beacon it accepted Walz for its Ph.D. program on the condition that he’d complete his master’s degree at Minnesota State.
"We have often accepted students conditionally in a cohort program when they are successfully finishing a master's degree at another institution," Rovang said.
Media outlets such as the New York Times have also noted that Walz "wrote his thesis on Holocaust education." Benson, however, said Walz "wrote what is called an 'alternate plan paper,'" which, unlike a thesis, consists of an "evaluation and analysis" of outside sources rather than original research.
"Many media organizations have referred to this as his 'thesis' in their news stories," Benson said.
But in fact, Walz did not perform the kind of original, academic research that’s required to produce a master’s thesis. And he never completed his doctoral work, which would have required original research at a more advanced level.