Showing posts with label plagiarism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label plagiarism. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Guttenberg, Althusmann + "Copy and paste"

In Germany we've had a couple of copying scandals with politicians who made their "doctor" on our universities by copying from other works without documenting these passages as being from someone else's authorship.
Most known should be the scandal around "our" former minister of defense who had to leave mainly due to this scandal - but not only due to this, there was also his incapacity for being a minister.
Now I have been reading an article in "my" newspaper about the "copy art" of Mr Althausmann who by chance also happened to have a very important role being the chairman of the "Kultusministerkonferenz" (KMK) , being "the" institution in Germany in charge of "proper scientifc work" (basically).
In a later article, an interview with Mr Wolfgang Löwer, there I thought why our universities don't run the "plagium software" on ANY work, EVERY student delivers, in order to show the students what can be found with the state of the technology at the moment, besides making them aware of their future as copycats.
Well, what I was going to say is that when I studied (Literature translation - my first attempt), I've had a "professor" in a spanish seminar (this prof did not speak any Spanish at all!) who had literally not allowed me having "own ideas".
It was a seminar about "Carmen Laforet: Nada" - a dreadful book. And I happened to realizing that "Nada" (Nothing / Nothingness) has been published short after Jean Paul Sartre's "L'Être et le néant (1943), which was a work "en vouge" in 1945, which every intellectual had "received" by that time, and in my opinion the title was simply a marketing effect in order to selling the book. And I simply wanted to show my deception with Carmen Laforet's work and the title had "nothing" to do with the content of the book - besides the fact that "Nada" was what I had gotten from this book.
What we (professor "and me") got to in the end was the I had no right for having own ideas or even own thoughts, as everything I stated had to be "scientifically documented". This makes it impossible to generate fresh ideas, because everything has to be "stated before" by someone who has published something already AND THEREFORE many people simply supress the documentation of their "inspirations", because they have been "systematically tought" "NOT TO THINK" and CAN not have ideas by themselves, besides this there is the social pressure of having the "Doctor Title" (if you want to achieve something in your life).
So in my (humble) opinion the problem is not that much in people copying without documenting where these thoughts come from, but in the root of plainly incompetent and inadecquate people teaching in universities.
Let's be honest: our (german) university personell is extremely incompetent in teaching, because this is not their purpose. It's the fact that they are being forced to teaching in order to reaching higher in the hierarchy of the university. And instead of making students hungry for research they simply "steamroll" every attempt of independent thinking.
It seems that "if you want to fight the system you have to be part of it" (which is almost impossible), and this approach also kills any innovation or progress, because everybody inside this system (obviously) wants to keep what he's achieved - as it must have been a fight for himself with himself to get into this system.
In order to conclude this topic in some way I would really suggest that universities run "rip off"-software on any and all student's work being delivered in universities, not only to detect "rip offs" but also for detecting "bad teaching" in universities. ... still: morality is something that has to come "from home", and people who did not learn that honesty is a value by itself should not be allowed into political carreers and in these cases of plagiarism these people should be banned for life from having any public function - as with corruption.
They have the right for defense, but in this case: "in dubio, CONTRA reo" (them being "public personalities" having to represent).
Another issue is the influence (specially) these people have on media, as they usually are very popular and know how to sell themselves and their image - even the image being bad they achieve (through the media) selling themselves as victims.