We are having a pint and my German friend T. suddenly asked me if I follow international, German politics. Well, no, have no idea, supine ignorance. The topic is too well fitted, as I am doing my PhD now. She takes a today exemplar of the Suddeutsche Zeitung and talks about it while fingering the pages and looking in vain for a picture of Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. Only a curious photograph of just one half of his face is showed.
Guttenberg (CDU) belongs to the aristocracy and is preceded by his nobility title. He is only 39 and I read that "very charismatic" as well. He completed his PhD in 2006 on something related to constitutional developments in the US and EU, which sounds kind of strange to me, since US and EU are beings of different constitutionality, if I can say so. Anyhow, after the turmoil he had because of Afghanistan in the previous months, now he has to face accusations of gross plagiarism, of flagrant and carelessly copying literal paragraphs from different sources, from day-today journal articles to Embassy writings.
The remarkable thing to me is that, although Guttenberg has claimed the accusations totally false, he has acknowledged part of the charges by giving that "undoubtedly, there are serious mistakes, which makes me quite unhappy". I don't understand this, you see? Why does he have to say so? I mean, what can people, public and journalists, know about mistakes a dissertation? I am more than sure that only a reduce percentage of the PhD dissertations and papers being published every year contains relevant, original pieces of work. In fact, most of PhD students just spend too much time writing what they have in a non-writen-before way, when it would be more productive to copy and paste from others and dedicate themselves to read and think more.
Undoubtedly, it is worse to confess that your work is a piece of shit, because you confess your inmorality: you knew about it, you did not work harder, you went and published an unreliable piece of obscure knowledge, so you are dishonest.
I can read between lines that 7 years is too much time to complete a PhD and that it should be a reason for it. I can see that Guttenberg was not full dedicated at all (not even part-time dedication, as he was a member of the Parliament in the meantime and became a father, as he said) and that the task must be almost impossible in those circumstances, as research is not just the summation of very scattered moments, no matter if the overall time accounts a whole lot. I can read all that in between lines, I can see that sometime you have to finish... Was it funded? Regardless of this, I think it is foolish to say what Guttenberg said, because nobody will understand it the right way.
It stinks, though, to political operation against the Minister to me. Could it be?
Even more, why does he relinquish his doctor title? Does not that mean that he is taking the accusations? Besides, it is the university who confers the title to the doctorate, so all he could do is to make a request to the School Administration asking to revoke his title.
Anyhow, is not School partly responsible for that? Who was Mr. Guttenberg's advisor? Is he not as well partly responsible? In my point of view, the accusations contains venom, are double-bladed knives hanging upon the University.
Why is such a fuss for a dissertation?... In Spain we have politicians who did not even finish the High School, nor their BS degrees, if you can believe that. In a sense it leads to mirth and merryment that someone named Guttenberg (notice, with an extra "t") is accused of "copying" and named such things are "Zu Copyberg" (ZDF Television) or "Baron-Cut-and-Paste" (Financial Times Deutschland). Isn't it?
(PLEASE, LEAVE YOUR COMMENT).
No comments:
Post a Comment