[csaa-forum] He copied, but he's not a plagiarist

[Arpad Bak]

A blog entry from The Economist's Eastern Approaches (excrept) - please feel free to distribute: 


Hungary's president: He copied, but he's not a plagiarist 

Mar 27th 2012

ANYONE seeking to understand contemporary Hungary could do worse than to take a look at the ongoing scandal around President Pál Schmitt’s doctoral thesis.

Mr Schmitt submitted his thesis, "Analysis of the Programme of the Modern Olympic Games", to the Budapest College of Physical Education in 1992, and received a summa cum laude grade. But in January hvg.hu, a news portal, accused him of having plagiarised substantial sections of his dissertation from a work by Nikolai Georgiev, a Bulgarian sports historian. Budapest’s Semmelweis University (which has since absorbed the PE college) set up a committee to investigate the allegations.

Mr Schmitt strongly protested his innocence, saying that his dissertation had been reviewed by a panel of history professors. He also acknowledged that he knew and had worked with Mr Georgiev, and that they had used the same sources.

The committee's report is over 1,000 pages long, but it has released a three-page summary today. It states that 17 pages of Mr Schmitt's thesis were lifted wholesale from a paper written by Klaus Heineman, a German sports sociologist. A further 180 pages were partly copied from Mr Georgiev's work. The dissertation, the committee says, also lacks proper citations and a bibliography.

In most countries Mr Schmitt would now be writing his resignation letter (or at least finding one to copy). A year ago Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the highly regarded German defence minister, resigned in disgrace after having been stripped of his PhD for
 plagiarism.

But it does not work like that in Hungary. 

(...) 

Read the full text here: http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2012/03/hungarys-president
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