Anyone who writes a doctoral thesis submits to a set of rules that has been finely balanced over many years. Foreign thoughts must be marked, direct quotations from other publications anyway. At the end, the candidate must swear in an oath that no other writings and aids than those specified were used in the dissertation and that the passages taken from the works used verbatim or in terms of content have been identified.
That also applied to the new CSU General Martin Huber when he made his Doctoral thesis on the role of the CSU in German western politics between 1954 and 1969 wrote. The lawyer and journalist Jochen Zenthöfer accuses him of cheating. A closer look shows exactly where the crux of the craftsmanship lies in the rather bulky work. Although it looks as if Huber did indicate the sources with which he worked. Just not consistently, but rather sporadically.
To do this, he simply rearranged the sentences. Example page 84. “De Gaulle wanted a Europe without the United States, which, however, contradicted Ludwig Erhard’s ideas about Europe. So it is not surprising that Erhard and de Gaulle did not get along, either factually or personally.”, Huber wrote. It is a paraphrase of words by the German journalist Guido Knopp.
In his play “Kanzler: The Mighty Ones of the Republic”, which was published in 2002, he wrote: “But De Gaulle wanted more European independence, a Europe without the USA. However, this in turn contradicted the ideas of Ludwig Erhard and many others about Europe. Of course, it was more serious that Erhard and de Gaulle did not get along either factually or personally.” However, a footnote does not appear immediately in Huber’s work, but only much later on the next page.
Dealing with original sources is serious
A pattern that shows up in many places. “Belated and hasty” indirect evidence is given, so that the direct reference to the source is no longer recognizable, says Bernhard Stahl, Professor of International Politics at the University of Passau. Which one may still consider as sloppiness in individual cases. In his view, Huber’s use of original sources is even more serious.
Actually, literal assumptions should also be marked as such, usually with quotation marks. One looks in vain for Huber. Also on page 10. Here Huber writes: “Meanwhile, the person-centered (“men make history”) has been replaced by one that takes structural conditions more into account (e.g. in social and economic history).”
A sentence that comes almost 1:1 from the “Handlexbuch Internationale Politik”, but is not marked here as a quote or as a paraphrase. Here, too, the footnote follows later. “To mark literal quotations as indirect is not enough and alone satisfies the offense of plagiarism,” says Stahl. If late documents and literal quotations not marked as such regularly coincide, “one has to assume plagiarism,” says Stahl.
Huber has his work checked at the LMU
How much sloppiness, how much system is behind Huber’s scientific work? The man who, hardly in office, was confronted with accusations of plagiarism. He says he did his work “to the best of my knowledge and belief.” A sentence that Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Annette Schavan and Franziska Giffey said before they lost their doctoral degrees.
Huber immediately fled to the front. On Sunday he asked the Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) to review the doctoral thesis. The responsible doctoral committee will now do the same, the Munich university announced on Monday. However, that could take a while. The length of this test is currently not foreseeable, according to the LMUthe aim is to conclude as quickly as possible.
Huber does not have to comply with the demands from the opposition that his doctorate be suspended for the time being: the doctoral regulations do not stipulate that the title be suspended during the examination. It is also unclear whether Huber – depending on the results of the examination – is threatened with his doctorate being revoked at all. According to the examination regulations of the time, the title can only be revoked up to five years after passing the examination – the deadline for this has already passed ten years ago.