Everything was going well for this highly educated and attractive politician, and at the young age of 39, he was definitely a rising star not only of Germany, but of European politics and society.
And then he lost everything for a careless (?) crime committed in a moment he will surely regret for the rest of his life. Sadly, it wasn't murder or even corruption. Had he been guilty of corruption, it would have been embarrassing, but he would at least have kept his Ph.D.. Murder would not have cost him his Ph.D. But when his guilt led to his university stripping him of his Ph.D., he also lost his job, along with his reputation and the respect of so many who had admired him the day before.
This is not fiction. It's a true story.
It happened earlier this year, in March 2011. The politician was Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. Germany was still Germany, whose Chancellor is Angela Merkel.
For all the details of this sorry tale of crime and punishment, see "Plagiarism in Dissertation Costs German Defense Minister His Job" (Dempsey, 2011)
As the title of The New York Times article tells us, zu Guttenberg's crime was plagiarism, which every good university treats far more seriously than murder. We have already seen in Quest that plagiarism is stealing and that Hartmann uses italics to emphasize the word must when she explains the importance of citing sources to avoid committing this crime (2007, p. 188).
In the right-hand column of this page, there is a section titled "AEP Class Blog - information pages", and in that section is a link to some Class Notes online. Those notes include a page called "Citing Sources I", with more information and a lot of examples of how to cite sources, both quotations and paraphrases, in academic work in order to avoid plagiarism. There also some blue highlighted notes on the use of citations in version d. of my essay, "That's Nice", on Crooks in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. For example, note 8. comments on an example of a source cited for a paraphrase, and note 13 comments on the citation for a quotation (= a copy and paste from a source) (Filicietti, 2011).
__________
References
Filicietti, P. (2011, May). That's nice. [incomplete draft of essay]. Retrieved May 29, 2011 from https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxhZXB3cml0aW5nc3xneDo5NjUyMDA3ZDgxMjY2YWE
Hartmann, P. (2007). Quest 2 Reading and Writing, (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Peter
ReplyDeleteI think this news is very useful for us. Sometimes students plagiarize because now it is easy by internet. Moreover I believe more than one of us did it, I did. Nowadays there is an epidemic of internet plagiarism mostly with secondary and high school students. For homework they search the net rather than read. I understand that in developed countries it is a huge crime, maybe in other countries too, but unfortunately the law is not always applied the same. Plagiarism is a crime because the people who do it are cheating, they are stealing the ideas of other people and showing themselves as the owner. This case is like Eduard Moore, “Ted” Kennedy who was expelled two times of Harvard, once for cheating on a test and once for paying a classmate to cheat for him. www.nndb.com/people. In addition he had an accident in which a friend died, and even he reported the accident 10 hrs later. The penalty was not huge, he was elected to the US Senate for many years and was considered as a candidate for President. I think it is fair that in this case the penalty was the loss of his PH.D. They do not how many of the credits that he got through plagiarism. Moreover in this case he must be an example of integrity. Finally murder in some cases is something that people do for impulse; however plagiarism is premeditated. Although, both are crimes.
I promise put more attention in your classes notes and I will try not to forget to use quotes and cite sources.