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WALL STREET JOURNAL
17-11-16 Doctor Who? Fake Ph.D.s Under Attack
FRANKFURT—Eva Ihnenfeldt was in her
bathrobe when German police showed up at 8 a.m. one morning to
search her home.
“I racked my brain for any
unexplained murders,” said the owner of a digital marketing
business, which was simultaneously searched. The search warrant
cited paragraph 132a of the German criminal code. Her crime was
blogging about a gag gift from her children, an honorary Ph.D.
certificate purchased for €39 on Groupon.
Academic titles are revered in
Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel and about every fifth lawmaker
has a Ph.D. So do nearly half of German executives. A top food
company is “Dr. Oetker.” A Frankfurt sex shop is Dr. Mueller.
Germans think nothing of stacking academic titles so their names
begin, “Prof. Dr. Dr.”This obsession has spawned not only a host
of weird rules and traditions—misuse can draw a year in prison
or stiff fines—but a posse of mostly anonymous vigilantes who
scout out unearned titles, academic plagiarists and other ivory
tower scofflaws.
Sleuthing under pseudonyms
including Dr. Simplicius and Plagin Hood, dozens of German
scholars spend hours of their own time scouring obscure theses
for questionable citations. Targets have included academics,
minor celebrities and leading politicians. Most are exposed on
the website VroniPlag Wiki, named for an early target.One
academic downloaded 50,000 medical theses and exposed more than
60 cases of significant plagiarism. Another spent three months,
full-time, investigating a single thesis.
“It’s quite addictive, like a
hobby,” said Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff, a professor of media
and computing at the University of Applied Sciences HTW Berlin,
who works under the name of WiseWoman.
VroniPlag Wiki initially carried
ads but dropped them because most were for ghostwriting
services, said Prof. Dr. Gerhard Dannemann, a Berlin-based law
professor who moonlights under the pseudonym PlagProf. Academic
frauds could use those to buy tailor-written theses. “That was
very irritating,” he said.
The group formed in 2011, when
Defense Minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg—who was touted as a
possible successor to Chancellor Merkel—was accused of
plagiarizing parts of his doctoral thesis.
Protests erupted around Germany.
Demonstrators carried banners reading “Summa cum fraude” and
waved shoes, mimicking the insult seen in ongoing Arab Spring
rebellions.More than 1,000 online vigilantes documented the
minister’s alleged transgressions. Mr. zu Guttenberg admitted
copying from other sources but denied any deliberate plagiarism.
He resigned as minister, and his university revoked his
doctorate.
In 2012 education minister Annette
Schavan, who had savaged Mr. zu Guttenberg over his plagiarism,
herself became a target.
Ms. Schavan’s university revoked
her doctorate. She denied plagiarism and challenged the decision
in court, but lost. She stepped down from the ministry and is
now Germany’s ambassador to the Holy See.German law in the past
prohibited foreign Ph.D.s from using the title “Dr.”American Ian
T. Baldwin, a Cornell-educated professor of ecology in eastern
Germany, received a summons from his local police chief in early
2008.
“He wanted to know how I planned to
plead to the charge of Titelmissbrauch,” or misuse of titles,
recalled Prof. Baldwin, who directs the Max Planck Institute for
Chemical Ecology. “I couldn’t even pronounce it.”
Several other American academics
were caught up in the investigation, triggered by an anonymous
whistleblower.
Public outcry prompted a change to
the law, but after his close shave, Prof. Baldwin still doesn’t
use his title in Germany.
Last summer, Rudolf Rizzolli, the
Italian-born chief executive of Sixt Leasing AG, was forced to
stop calling himself “Dr.” in Germany after it emerged he had
received a regular degree from a university in Milan. In Italy,
all degree-holders can be addressed as “dottore.”
The German press spoke scathingly
of “Brennerdoktor,” a nickname, referring to the Alpine pass
between Austria and Italy, for northern Italians who use the
title too liberally. A spokesman said Mr. Rizzolli now uses the
Italian title “Dott.”
A strict protocol governs how
Ph.D.s should be addressed, especially at work. Germany’s
federal labor court ruled in 1984 that the incorrect or
incomplete use of an academic title at work represents an attack
on an employee’s personal rights.
The registration web page for one
recent corporate reception offered the choice of 35 titles,
including “Prof. Dr. Dr.h.c.P.”Jan Schaumann, a career coach at
newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, told one confused reader this
week that while it is customary to use the full title with a
doctorate’s subject in the address line of a letter—“Herr Dr.
jur. X,” for instance, for a lawyer—the shortened form “Herr Dr.
X.” should be used in the letter itself, or in conversation.
(There’s debate about how to handle business cards.)
Don’t drop the Herr or Frau in
front of the string of degrees; “there’s got to be time for
that,” he said.
Need more guidance? A website,
doktorandenforum.de, spells out the minutiae of doctorate
protocol.Stefan Sprenger, a Frankfurt magician stage-named “The
Impostor,” in 2012 bought “the most ridiculous” title he could
on Groupon: an “Honorary Doctor of Immortality” degree. “Nobody
is going to take that seriously,” he said he assumed.
Two police arrived with a search
warrant. Investigators had scoured social networks such as Xing,
a career-oriented site, where Mr. Sprenger had posted his joke
qualification on his magician profile.
“I thought it could be a big joke,”
Mr. Sprenger said. He handed over his certificate and eventually
paid around €1,000 to settle the case.
Around 70 other targets of police
raids paid substantial sums to end proceedings against them,
said Dr. Ulla Hingst, a public prosecutor.Ms. Ihnenfeldt, who
faced police in her bathrobe in 2013, refused to settle. Her
case reached Germany’s top court, which last year ruled in her
favor.
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