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.

http://www.faz.net/s/Rub117C535CDF414415BB243B181B8B60AE/Doc~EFD4E1E1A128C4A388760CEE978C4A7A1~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html

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.

Hitler as an excuse not to grow up

Caught up with a Bo Burnham tune "Little Hitler" It's been making the rounds

What a charming young man Bo Burnham is. He cleverly wants to assert his boyishness by invoking Hitler. His song riffs on the familiar analogy that infants are tyrants and then takes it to the extreme. In the end, all this song reveals is a young man's fear of parenting. In other words, he worries that he will lose his independence to the demands of a child. Couple this with a juvenile sense of humor that relishes saying the unspeakable. By babbling on rudely about Hitler and the Jews, the singer further demonstrates his infantile state of mind, his inability to take anything seriously. "Look how goofy I am. I can even make jokes about the Holocaust. Clearly I am not ready to be a father." Just hope his girlfriend is not Jewish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zb7_2EiZGY

I know, I should lighten up, but I can't--I am a German professor.

Many thanks to Daniel Magilow for winding me up.

Change in the Weather

Klimawechsel is a new Doris Dörrie German sex comedy--yes, and it is about menopause and viagra. Hilarious. The story involves a bunch of middle aged teachers in Munich high school who are all going through their various sexual and marital crises. There is the art teacher with the roving yoga teacher husband who likes to hold his eager students in intimate poses. There are the middle aged women who flock to the yoga class. The one teacher who has an affair with a young student and the other who is becoming a Sufi. The men are pretty much one note characters, either constantly on the prowl for other women or gentle and supportive of their woman's every mood. On top of this chaotic mix are two characters who stand out for their vicious humor--a shrink and a gynecologist who take sadistic pleasure in giving their patients ridiculous advice. They are themselves like teachers complaining about their students' idiotic statements, except in this case they are mocking the teachers' endless middle-aged whining.

The first episodes are best, --witty, crazy and cruelly ironic at moments. Over time, the characters prove to be a bit unstable: the sexy yoga teacher drops out of the picture, the gynecologist falls victim to her own menopausal craziness.

Most convincing is one mother-daughter conflict where mom is sexually frustrated as her daughter is prancing around pulling men in from all corners.

So get your all-regions DVD-player--they are easy to buy on the internet, and check out this German sitcom available on disk.

Whether it ever makes over to the US is hard to say. Still, this is entertaining stuff. Post-Sex and the City, more professional than Desperate Housewives, a chick show for the over 45 crowd. The kids might not get the jokes, but the show uses that distinction nicely to show that the world does not just have to revolve around vampire-thin high school kids.

University Deregulation

State universities have an enormous amount of bureaucracy: reports, evaluations, security checks, monitoring arrangements, computer surveillance disguised as support, mid-level committees reviewing the decisions of lower level committees. The layers have been there for so long many people forget what it was like to operate without all the endless checks and imbalances. As budget cuts force state universities to reduce their staffs, as units are consolidated so that fewer secretaries are performing more work, it would be worth considering a reduction in the amount of bureaucracy.

Yes, in my middle age I have come to sound Republican, but really this is a plea for more autonomy for the individual university units to carry out their mission without all the restrictions that bureaucracies impose. Professors, lecturers, department heads, librarians and administrative assistants are constantly double and triple checking before acting, because of the obligation to enter any decision into the university administrative apparatus.

But now we are operating with greatly reduced resources, fewer administrators fulfilling the same high level of regulations.

So as a cost cutting measure, and in the spirit of neo-liberal university administration--Why not reduce the restrictions on computers, simplify transactions between departments, eliminate some of the redundant administrative reviews?

If we are going to act like businesses here at the university, then let us stream line the bureaucracy while we are cutting everything else.

Like a sailor

Shocking news, even German sailors drink too much and play sexual games on board their ship. The Kapitan has been known to use unusually rude language when addressing his subordinates. Sometimes ordinary sailors get revenge on their officers in sneaky ways. All of this produces a scandal at the highest level in Germany, with calls for the defense minister to resign.

Presumably no navy in the world still rules its own through "rum, sodomy, and the lash," nevertheless it is really quite amazing to see how sensitive the German press has become to even the slightest bit of unruliness in its military, and these were sailors on an three masted "tall ship" as opposed to a heavily armed modern vessel.

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/gorch-fock-affaere-kapitaen-nannte-soldaten-minderwertiges-menschenmaterial-1.1051091

Perhaps we should all continue to be grateful that the German military is so remarkably lamb-like, but the political scandal has been, when compared to any number of American incidents, down-right silly.

When you live in a Small Town #1

"Nichts Großes, nichts Erhabenes, nichts Emporstrebendes ist hier zu finden. Alles ist beengt, kleinlich, niedergedrückt, alles ein Bild der Leerheit und Sinkens. Mehr als eine mittelmäßige Existenz verlangt man gar nicht, man will nur so viel Erleichterung der Fesseln, um ruhiger für die Tyrannen arbeiten zu können."

No, this is not Andy Warhol describing Pittsburgh, but its close.

This description comes from Georg Friedrich Rebmann writing in 1795 about the city of Nürnberg. He has the attitude that most Central Europeans had about Albrecht Dürer--it had declined massively since the glory days of the fifteenth century. The usual explanation given by historians--the ruling patriarchs took on massive debts that they could not pay off, the city stagnated, old rules were never modernized.

Holocaust Hyperbole as a Warning Sign

Making hyperbolic and apocalyptic comparisons that evoke the Holocaust, having a tendency to escalate disagreements by using extreme and irreconcilable terms, way out of proportion to the immediate situation, these are some of the rhetorical similarities between mad shooters and political extremists that have nothing to do with gun laws. The Holocaust is the definitive extreme case in any debate, worse than global nuclear war because it has actually happened, the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki aside. The Holocaust has rhetorical power because it readily spreads into any number of Old Testament comparisons. So it becomes easy to slide from Scripture to genocide for some people. This then is a first sign that someone is imbalanced--when they start speaking in such end of the world language to describe a much more ordinary confrontation. If a problem with a professor, leads a student to suggest genocide, then he is seriously off the beam. If a politician evokes medieval pogroms to cast herself as the victim of unfair rhetoric, than she, too, has clearly lost all sense of proportion. And it is these slips , these moments when the mask of normalcy slips, when the hugely disproportionate metaphors stream out, that you worry about what is going in the speaker's mind. The link between Palin and the shooter is now coming out after the fact--in the tendency to make eerie and unfitting comparisons between their own personal troubles and the historical murder of the Jewish people. In her denial of any connection to the shooter, she shows just how her reasoning and rhetoric share a common tendency.