Tobias Schwarz/Reuters
Education Minister Annette Schavan, left, with Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday.
BERLIN — For 32 years, the German education minister’s 351-page dissertation sat on a shelf at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf gathering dust while its author pursued a successful political career that carried her to the highest circles of German government.
The academic work was a ticking time bomb, however, and it exploded last year when an anonymous blogger published a catalog of passages suspected of having been lifted from other publications without proper attribution.
The university revoked the doctorate of the minister, Prof. Dr. Annette Schavan, on Tuesday (she retains the title pending appeal), and on Saturday she was forced to resign her cabinet post. It was the second time a minister had quit the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel for plagiarism in less than two years.
In an emotional news conference, Dr. Schavan said that she would sue to win back the doctorate, but in the meantime would resign for the greater good. “First the country, then the party and then yourself,” she said.
Standing beside her, Dr. Merkel, her friend and confidante, said that she accepted Dr. Schavan’s resignation “only with a very heavy heart,” but that politically there was no alternative.
Coming after Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was forced to step down as defense minister over plagiarism charges in 2011, Dr. Schavan’s déjà-vu scandal can only hurt Dr. Merkel ahead of September’s parliamentary election. But the two ministers are far from the only German officials to have recently had their postgraduate degrees yanked amid accusations of academic dishonesty, prompting national soul-searching about what flaws the cases reveal about the German character.
Here in the homeland of schadenfreude, digging up academic deception by politicians has become an unlikely political blood sport. There is even a collaborative, wiki-style platform where people can anonymously inspect academic texts, known as VroniPlag.
On one level, the exposure of these cases reflects certain very Teutonic traits, including a rigid adherence to principle and a know-it-all streak. “I just think that many Germans have a police gene in their genetic makeup,” said Prof. Dr. Volker Rieble, a law professor at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich.
But many people attribute the underlying deceptions to an abiding lust and respect for academic accolades, including the use of Prof. before Dr. and occasionally Dr. Dr. for those with two doctoral degrees, which Dr. Rieble called “title arousal.”
“In other countries people aren’t as vain about their titles,” he said. “With this obsession for titles, of course, comes title envy.”
German culture places a greater premium on doctorates than Americans do as marks of distinction and erudition. A surprising number of doctors of nonmedical subjects like literature and sociology put “Dr.” on their mailboxes and telephone-directory listings. The Web site of the German Parliament, the Bundestag, shows that 125 of 622 people elected to the current Parliament (including Dr. Schavan and then-Dr. Guttenberg) have doctorates.
Dr. Merkel appointed Prof. Dr. Johanna Wanka, the state minister of science and culture in Lower Saxony, to take over Dr. Schavan’s position. Prof. Dr. Wanka got her doctorate in 1980, the same year as Dr. Schavan.
The influential finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, is a doctor of law. The vice chancellor, Philipp Rösler, is an ophthalmologist and thus, the only one who most Americans would call “doctor.”
For the plagiarism scalp-hunters, the abundance of titles provides what in military circles is known as a target-rich environment. The University of Heidelberg revoked the doctorate of Silvana Koch-Mehrin, former vice president of the European Parliament and a leading member of Germany’s Free Democratic Party, in 2011 and is still fighting the charges in court.
Another German member of the European Parliament, Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, saw his doctorate of philosophy revoked by the University of Bonn in 2011 after the VroniPlag Web site uncovered a number of dubious passages. Florian Graf, head of the Christian Democrats’ delegation in the Berlin city legislature, lost his Ph.D. last year after admitting to copying from other scholars’ works without giving them proper credit.
In many countries, busy professionals with little interest in tenure-track positions at universities do not tend to bother writing dissertations. In Germany academic titles provide an ego boost that lures even businesspeople to pursue them.
About 25,000 Germans earn doctorates each year, the most of anywhere in Europe, according to the Web site Research in Germany, co-sponsored by the Ministry of Education and the German Academic Exchange Service.
German Education Chief Quits in Scandal Reflecting Fascination With Titles
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German Education Chief Quits in Scandal Reflecting Fascination With Titles
