Germany’s Defense Minister has resigned from Angela Merkel’s government in disgrace. The issue is that large portions of his 2006 doctoral dissertation at the University of Bayreuth was plagiarized.
For those Gen-Whiners who are the products of the US education system in the past 20 years, “plagiarism” means quoting other people’s words without attributing the proper source. You know—when you “research” a term paper by Googling & then cutting-&-pasting whole articles from Wikipedia or TMZ, pretending you actually, you know, wrote it. I know you’ll find this difficult to grasp (for one thing, we’re talking about more than 140 characters), but this practice is considered wrong in any academic community that hasn’t surrendered entirely to the text-crowd.
What gives Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg’s crime a particular irony is the fact that he was studying…law.
Well—part of the problem with lawyers is that they learn their ethics in law school.
Anyhow—the Euros take their academic credentials seriously (as opposed to Americans, who think the very act of getting a non-MBA advanced degree vaguely anti-democratic; certainly anti-Republican), so after some attempts to brazen his way out of the publicity, Guttenberg has resigned.
What I’m kind of confused about is why it took six years to discover the plagiarism. Was Guttenberg the only person at Bayreuth who had access to the Internet? Were his thesis readers unable to recognize the works he quoted but didn’t cite?
The words of one of my masters oral committee members, Eugene D. Genovese, come to mind. I’m going to paraphrase: Don’t plagiarize: if it’s good, your professor is going to recognize it; if it’s not, you’re going to get a bad grade.
Or you'll have to resign your political office.
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