Sunday, February 27, 2011
Bayreuth Professor on Guttenberg
You can read much from the way in which Professor Lepsius moves and speaks. His speech is articulate and fluid, while the tone of his voice indicates not only that he is offended but on some deep level disappointed. There is something boyish about the manner in which he enunciates even though the actual content of his speech is appropriately composed, mature, direct and judgmental. Needless to say he comes across as the opposite of Guttenberg, who has spoken to the camera about this scandal either in playful winks or in the quite demeanor of someone who is receiving censure with the expectation that later he will be allowed to continue playing. Lepsius, on the other hand, does not want to come across as the fire and brimstone judge, but more than disbelieving recipient of a blatant lie. He calls Guttenberg a fraud, which the newspapers point out would, under different circumstances, have been grounds for a law suit. There is more than a little unconscious parent-child role-playing embedded in the public statements made on all sides.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Politicians as Students
Universities cannot compete in high-level politics, but they have a financial need to do so.
As European and American universities are racing each other to establish a top-tier of elite institutions that will command respect globally, they have increasingly enjoyed the attention of politicians, who want the caché of an academic degree and a smooth rhetorical command over complex political discourse. Seems like a nice match, but alas in their eagerness to show that they attract the upper echelon to their seminars, universities have gotten themselves caught in political fights they have no control over.
Saif, son of Khadaffi, ruler of Libya, and the doctorate he earned from the London School of Economics provides the clearest example these days. As of this last week, the LSE is distancing itself as quickly as possible from its former student. Yet not too long ago, there was a lot of understated, self-congratulatory talk that the institution was grooming the next ruler of Libya.
After the uprising in Libya and Saif's defense of his father's crack down, the professorial tone has changed dramatically. Never mind the minor controversy about whether he received help from a consulting company or whether financial donations had any role to play in his education, as this week's broadcasts from Tripoli show, the Enlightened son speaks of civil war and blood flowing, in order to justify his father stomping out democracy.
What was the title of Saif's dissertation? "The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions: From 'Soft Power' to Collective Decision-Making?" In other words, the transition to democracy Saif and his professors discussed is now underway in a surprisingly radical way ---and there is no soft power coming from the guns of mercenaries defending the old regime.
The contradiction between the content of the dissertation and the political repression its author condones is too much for the university, but what can they really do about it?
Similarly the University of Bayreuth is back-peddling from the German defense minister, who, as everyone now recognizes, presented a plagiarized dissertation to earn a doctorate. To top it off, and to make the comparison with Saif even more explicit, there are questions whether Guttenberg arranged a donation for an endowed professorship in the same institute where he earned his PhD.
The major difference: The London School of Economics attracts the ruling elite from around the world whereas the University of Bayreuth plays in a lesser league.
But here is a lesson for the admissions committees: When these scandals erupt, there is almost nothing a university can do except retreat. They have no means of actively engaging in a power struggle except to refuse to participate, to preserve their autonomy. We have little or no influence on what students do once they graduate.
As Voltaire and any number of Enlightenment intellectuals learned, educating the prince, even if you are sleeping with him, never works out well.
American universities do operate their own kind of soft power: they have remarkably sophisticated means of tracking former students and they know how to inspire nostalgia and idealism for a lost youth. But the donations that follow these emotions are made long after the degrees have been granted, and they have more to do with first kisses and football games than with changing the face of Middle East democracy.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Dissertation on plagiarized dissertations
What we need is a dissertation about plagiarized dissertations.
The controversy around German defense minister Guttenberg's plagiarized dissertation roars along, at least in academic circles. By renouncing the Dr. title, Guttenberg hoped to be one step ahead of the University of Bayreuth which after a few days review rescinded the same title. Now the debate circles around questions of whether Guttenberg was legally capable of renouncing his title. Once a doctor, always a doctor. Having received the title, it was not his to abandon, rather only the university could strip it from him, and even there the debate grows a new branch: on what legal basis can the university do so.
Then there are those who want the state prosecutor to move against Guttenberg for having committed fraud with his cut and paste job.
You know what's coming soon: a dissertation or five about the plagiarized dissertation. What better revenge than an analysis of the media event that is forgery? There has got to be a Kittler student out there ready to prove he's more cynical than the rest--ready to explain how plagiarism is the Ur-form of the Republic of Letters. Guttenberg as the contemporary re-animation of the Baroque scholar collating and translating other works. Before you know it, someone will allude to Faust and then Guttenberg will suddenly become an academic folk hero as opposed to just being the folk hero he seems to be in some corners.
The research work has already begun, and nevermind what was written here not a few days ago about how easy it was to uncover Guttenberg's deception--there are some seriously detailed and well-footnoted, or hypertexted, web pages out there tracking down ever twist in the downward spiral of Guttenberg's academic career.
Over at bluthilde, a lot of work has gone into collecting the fakery:
http://bluthilde.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/grundlagen-wissenschaftlichen-ziterens/
The real question is what will become of German politics if Guttenberg manages to shove this forgery aside and carry on as if all that mattered was the fact that he was well-loved, admired and celebrated by many. "It doesn't matter, I am popular."
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Snow Blizzard Blog
Invade Libya, or not
Invade Libya. You know Sarkozy is talking about it with his advisors right now. Someone is calling Angela Merkel's assistant to check what she thinks. The State Department has been sounded out, they have first dibs on invading Muslim nations after all.
The initial reports are that Europe is not excluding the possibility of undertaking an humanitarian intervention:
NATO Secretary General, Rasmussen, states there are no plans to intervene, but with every denial comes its antithesis, and the French defense minister, Alain Juppe, has suggested taking action, in the form of sanctions, to prevent further humanitarian violations.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2011/02/libya-protests-5.html
Yet there is a cardinal rule in politics: when your opponent is self-destructing, get out of the way.
What better way to save Khadaffi than to turn him into a defender of national security. Right now his opponents are citizens of his own country and the military is wavering in their resolve to shoot. This has obviously been the key to the entire democratic movement in the Middle East: armies who do not wish to massacre the people.
Given the prospect of French, British or German ( I doubt it) troops in Libya, the situation would change dramatically. The Libyan army and air force would snap to attention and obey the commands of the supreme leader to defend the nation against colonialist aggressors using this moment of domestic turmoil to invade.
The best policy is to let the democratic revolution unfold without reviving French or even Turkish fantasies of Mediterranean hegemony. So long as Khadaffi is in power it would be madness to present him with a rallying cry for the nation. Right now he is blaming the uprising on Al-Kaeda and Nescafe spiked with Ecstasy. Better to leave him to his mad delusions than to give him a ideological lifeline.
Better than a sex scandal?
Better than a sex scandal? If the German defense minister had slept with someone inappropriate, say a party girl who was also having an affair with someone at the Russian embassy and we were in the middle of the Cold War, that would have made for fast news. As it turns out, he just forged his dissertation. Seems awfully pedantic
But wait....
Sex scandals have become blasé, Europeans have gone out of their way to demonstrate that they will tolerate most adult screwing around, so long as it is not linked to nuclear war, even indirectly.
German newspapers do not want to let this scandal slide. They are doing a far better job at hammering Guttenberg than the SPD, Greens, or the rest of the left. You sense that journalists are a touchy lot when comes to plagiarism, that perhaps they do not appreciate having their labor stolen. They can criticize Guttenberg unrelentingly about academic cheating in a way that they never would have if he had been caught in bed with someone other than his wife. For romance or just plain sex, you have to display worldly understanding. But for systematically copying other people's intellectual labor, there is no limit to how much you can criticize. Stupidity, especially in the powerful, is fair game; much more so than mere lust.
The Sueddeutsche Zeitung complains that Guttenberg's off-handed dismissal of his own misdeeds displays a new disdain for academia.
Yet on the other hand, up until a very short while ago, Guttenberg felt the need to add the DR. title to his name, for in Germany PhDs have long been considered a necessary attribute in order to be taken seriously in public. Those long winded round-table discussions about politics on German TV have a gravity unseen here. Guttenberg wanted to be accepted as a heavy, as an expert in political history, someone who could make pronouncements on the future of Europe.
So if anything, the urge to plagiarize demonstrates the perceived need to look educated. Only after the ruse has failed, do Guttenberg's defenders pretend that university degrees really are not so important for getting things done in politics. You could say that American conservatives have long had a such disregard for education, their own and society's.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Guttenberg Plagiarism
The German newspapers are filled with reports on the plagarism scandal swirling around the defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg--a handsome charismatic fellow who has a devote following in Southern conservative circles. He was a rising star and main competitor to the Germany's foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle.
Bildung is supposed to matter in Germany, so a politician cannot immediately play a "know-nothing" manuever as it is done in the US. Ph.D.s actually considered important in Germany's public life. Angela Merkel has one, Helmut Kohl as well, though the rumors have swirled for years that his was also ghost written.
What's new about the Guttenberg scandal is the internet: It is so easy to plagiarize using the internet, and it is just as easy to uncover plagiarism. There are now wikisites in Germany devoted to finding all the stolen quotes in Guttenberg's dissertation. Hunting them down has become a past time for German academics. If you have been grinding away for years on your own opus, why not take a few hours off to pick at the pretty boy politician's forgery, and then post your findings publically. Good resentment-filled academic fun.
The other lesson in the Guttenberg dissertation is recognizing how systematic and widespread the plagiarism is. The dissertation does not just contain a few misquotations and inaccurate footnotes. From the opening paragraph that was lifted from an article in Germany's leading business newspaper onwards, the cut and paste job was carried out systematically by Guttenberg or his ghost-writer. Out of 393 pages for the entire dissertation, 270 have plagiarized material.
Plagiarism can take a lot of work, it requires all sorts of editorial skills, which the internet facilitates but also uncovers.
Conspiracy theorists like to point out that the dissertation Helmut Kohl wrote in the 1950s has disappeared from the shelves of German libraries. The sources it quotes are not available online, so it would take an enormous effort to track down any irregularities. The job could really only be done by an expert in the field, whereas now with Guttenberg, anyone with a search engine and some basic research skills can uncover the defense minister's lies.