By Stephan Manning.
Here we go again: Ursula von der Leyen, Germany’s Minister of Defence, has become the latest target of VroniPlag* Wiki – an ongoing campaign against plagiarism in German doctoral theses, which has famously led to the downfall of several German, mostly conservative, politicians, including Annette Schavan (former German Minister of Education) and Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (former Minister of Defence). Since it started in 2011, the campaign has resulted in the revocation of 26 PhD titles obtained by politicians and other people of public interest. In fact, plagiarism in doctoral theses has become one of the major reasons for office-bearers in German governments to lose their jobs prematurely. How is that even possible? Who cares about plagiarism in dissertations anyway? Don’t we copy and paste all the time? And why care about plagiarism when nobody actually reads those dissertations to begin with?
Organizations and Social Change 