Silvana Koch-Mehrin, until recently vice-president of the European Parliament, has joined Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg in losing a doctoral degree. The former German defence minister had his doctorate withdrawn after his Alma Mater, the University of Bamberg, noticed a few indefensible shortcomings in Guttenberg’s dissertation (the most blatant one: pretty much none of its 450 pages had been written by the alleged author). Now, Koch-Mehrin has met the same fate. Three days ago, the University of Heidelberg announced that her degree was to be scrapped. Investigators had found 120 instances of obvious plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation, which Koch-Mehrin had submitted to the university’s philosophical faculty in 1999.
Yet, while the two cases are similar, the two fraudsters could not have behaved more differently in the aftermath of their respective exposure. While Guttenberg eventually stepped down from all political functions, retired to his Franconian castle and even announced his intention to leave Germany, Koch-Mehrin has kept her seat in the European parliament. Worse, she has started a childish skirmish with her former university. In a press statement, she claims that Heidelberg knew about the weaknesses of her dissertation: “[They] were known to the University of Heidelberg for 11 years, for all these words can be found in the written assessment of my supervisor. His highly critical remarks were seconded explicitly by the second examiner. […] The board of examiners awarded my doctoral degree in full awareness of the obvious weaknesses of my work. Today the board sees this differently.”
One is tempted to say to the poor girl: “Shut up, you are making it worse”. It is mind-boggling to see a respected parliamentarian complaining about the decision of an independent academic commission while not displaying any awareness of having made fundamental mistakes. After years of studying and alleged independent research, Koch-Mehrin evidently does even not grasp the basics of good academic conduct. She does not seem to understand the difference between a poor dissertation – which her supervisors thought she had produced – and a plagiarised one – which she did submit.
Why then, one might wonder, do otherwise intelligent and capable individuals engage in such borderline criminal behaviour? Why do they seek a doctorate at all if they have no intention to attempt a career in academia? The answer: they are victims of title-mania, a notorious and traditional illness of German society that used to be even worse in the past than it is today. While in previous decades and centuries all types of professional titles were used as social ranks, contemporary German society does not bother much about “executives”, “directors” or “presidents”. Weirdly, academic titles are being exempt from this nonchalance. PhDs and professorships continue to be displayed on electoral posters and are (ab)used for a range of other non-academic purposes.
Title-mania is a disorder that could so easily be cured if only academic distinctions would be seen as what they are, namely a means of designating a person’s status within academic contexts, nothing more. A doctoral degree itself says nothing about the holder’s career prospects, very little about his intelligence, and nothing about his human quality. Ideally, and this is the case in most countries, academic titles should be used only internally within the academic community. This is what distinguishes the likes of Romani Prodi, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and Barack Obama from German politicians. Despite their academic backgrounds, they would never have dreamed of presenting themselves as “doctors” or “professors” in electoral campaigns.
If German society and German universities could learn one thing from the Guttenberg and Koch-Mehrin affairs, it should be this: in the future, doctoral candidates ought to be chosen on the basis of their potential to pursue academic careers (it is possible to be highly intelligent and still not posses this potential, and there’s nothing shameful about that). Oh, and people should abandon the silly practice of looking up in awe to anyone with the letters “D” and “R” in front of their name. For there is a simple rule, first discovered by the great historian Carlo Cipolla, that applies to academics and non-academics alike: “The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.” In our context, this means that a “doctor” may either be smart or a total twat. We have to rely on empirics, not on academic titles, to find out.
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