The Faculty Senate of the University of Düsseldorf has retracted the Ph.D (Education) awarded in 1980 to Annette Schavan, currently Minister of Education in the German government, contending that her dissertation was not original work. This is the second time a minister in Angela Merkel’s government has been found to have received a Ph.D, and to some extent built a career, on shoddy scholarship. But this time it’s the Minister of Education, who ought to have taken education seriously, back in the days when she was purportedly making a contribution to knowledge rather than just administering it!

Some details about the charges against Frau Schavan are given here. Die Zeit doesn’t go so far as to consider a motive established, but it does note that a large part of the “dissertation” consisted of passages recopied from existing secondary works, not always footnoted. The Faculty was sterner, according to the FAZ:

Die Häufung und Konstruktion wörtlicher Übernahmen, auch die Nichterwähnung von Literaturtiteln in Fußnoten oder sogar im Literaturverzeichnis hätten nach Überzeugung des Fakultätsrats das Gesamtbild ergeben, „dass die damalige Doktorandin systematisch und vorsätzlich über die gesamte Dissertation verteilt gedankliche Leistungen vorgab, die sie in Wirklichkeit nicht selbst erbracht hatte“, heißt es in der Begründung.

In my opinion the Faculty should give itself a slap or two too, for having accepted it in the first place. They should have known that the kind of person who turns in a collage-dissertation is bound to go far– farther in any case than the poor schmucks who think, analyze, and build.

And the best part? The dissertation is entitled “Character and Conscience: Studies on the Preconditions, Necessity and Requirements of Contemporary Moral Education” (Person und Gewissen: Studien zu Voraussetzungen, Notwendigkeit und Erfordernissen heutiger Gewissensbildung).