Cutting funding for public broadcasting in the US

When I have the time, I try to listen to podcasts of the Diane Rehm show, and on this one from January 20 (I am a bit behind) the speakers provide two interesting statistics:

1. Funding for public broadcasting in the US makes up only 1/25th of one percent of discretionary spending in the US budget, and
2. Expenditures on public broadcasting in the US pale in comparison to the budgets in other countries. While PBS costs the average US citizen 1.35 dollars per year, a Brit spends 82 dollars a year on the BBC, while a Canadian spends 30 dollars on the CBC (Japan also comes in at around 60 dollars per capita each year). 

While the speaker did not talk about Germany, based on the figures I discuss here Germany would come in even above the level of the BBC at closer to 100 dollars per year per person. The monthly subscription rate is around 20 dollars a month per household, but people without televisions (and, more recently, without computers) do not have to pay, and there are exceptions for people with televisions who are undergoing hardship.

Clearly, there is no money to be saved from cutting funding for public broadcasting. The attack therefore cannot be financially motivated; it is political. Take away public broadcasting, and you are left with corporate-financed media – which is exactly what many Republicans want.

Guttenberg's gone

Guttenberg has finally stepped down.

One of the most interesting aspects of this issue was the public's continuing support for the German Defense Minister. In the recent polls published this weekend, an overwhelming majority of Germans across all political parties wanted him to stay in office.

Perhaps because of the academic nature of plagiarism, support apparently seems to differ greatly across the media, with the greatest outrage found in the more intellectual newspapers, as the second chart shows. Over the weekend, an open letter from German PhDs was delivered to Chancellor Merkel asking her not to take the matter so lightly, and more than 1,000 professors signed their own open letter along the same lines.

What I don't get – but perhaps I am too academic myself (I started, but thankfully did not finish, a dissertation) – is why everyone was so apologetic on his behalf. The German media are full of people saying, "My goodness, who didn't cheat in school?" But there was actually a recent case of a local politician (CDU) who was found to have committed plagiarism and was forced to step down, so there is an immediate precedents for the case.

Furthermore, as practically everyone else who wanted him to step down as pointed out, every other imaginable comparable situation would also have been handled differently. Soccer referees who are found to have been paid off create quite a commotion, and soccer games don't matter.

That's why I find this report (in German) so interesting. Apparently, Guttenberg got the equivalent of a C on his exams and therefore should not have been allowed to write a dissertation at all; he would have received his degree without honors and been asked to stop. But the two professors who made the decision were CSU party members.

A new Wiki was also created, where other dissertations of prominent German politicians are to be inspected.

Personally, I don't find Guttenberg to be exactly contrite. In stepping down, he said he could no longer do his job properly when the debate "about my person is being carried out on the shoulders of the soldiers," which sounds a bit like everyone should have shut up and left him alone. More outrageously, he said that anyone who accused him of consciously plagiarizing was guilty of "libel." The Wiki that investigated his dissertation has now found plagiarism on over 76 percent of the pages. Practically the only thing that isn't plagiarized is the bibliography and table of contents. I doubt that Guttenberg wants to fight this one out in court, but just in case: Guttenberg, your dissertation was either ghostwritten (in which case you may actually not have known about the extent of the plagiarism), or you did it yourself and knew exactly what you were doing.

My Nazi comparison

Only last week, I told some friends at Facebook who were complaining about reactionary politicians in their home state of Wisconsin that I have been tired of comparisons with Hitler and the Nazis for a long time. But Omar Qaddafi's recent performance in which he practically declares war on his own people does remind me of Hitler's comments at the end of World War II that the best Germans had already died, so the rest might as well go, too.

Here's hoping that the people of Libya will not suffer too much before the inevitable happens.

Plagiarism IV - Mr. Guttenberg

As you may know, German Defense Minister Guttenberg asked his university to take back his doctorate because his dissertation is demonstrably a farce. The Wiki devoted to collecting evidence of plagiarism has come up with the wonderful chart you see to the side. The blue bits are the table of contents at the beginning and the bibliography at the end. The white bits are the parts where no plagiarism was found. Everything that is black or red is plagiarized.

Dishearteningly, his admission of "grave mistakes" has not caused popular German sentiment to turn against him. According to polls recently taken, an overwhelming number of Germans across all party lines overwhelmingly think he is doing a good job as a minister.

Personally, he has not given me much reason to complain either. The only question is whether the unbelievable, probably unprecedented level of plagiarism he committed is an indication of a general inability to accept facts and play by the rules – which is why I find this article (in German) the most interesting of any I have read on the matter. The author basically points out a number of times when Guttenberg was caught lying (mostly related to his CV) and, more importantly, the recent cases where people from his Defense Ministry outright called him a liar.

The willingness of the German public to view this matter as trivial – or at least not pertinent to his work as a top politician – surprises me. Some have argued that, since the majority of Germans do not have a college degree (until recently, there was no Bachelor's, so you had to study at least six years to get your first degree at the Master's level), Joe the Plumber might have a hard time appreciating what plagiarism in a dissertation means. But I don't buy that explanation. If Joe the Plumber turned out to have gotten certification to set up a plumbing business not because he passed the exam like everyone else, but because his nephew was the person rubber-stamping the certificates and his great uncle the one administering the exam, I think everyone would agree that we do not want such practices.

For the moment, Guttenberg seems to be weathering the storm well. Who knows how long that will go on?

Dr. Dr. h.c.

Speaking of the German fascination with doctorates, I just remembered this piece that I wrote back in 2005:

The one American businessman or the other had regular contact with German colleagues, who apparently generally had about three PhDs apiece. I tried to put things into perspective and pointed out that Germans were generally of the opinion that they could not compete with Americans. And this "Dr. Dr. Dr. h.c." business is a bit of intellectual arrogance that Americans cannot afford in the anti-intellectual USA. A German with a Ph.D. will often insist on being called Dr. So-and-so instead of Mr. or Ms. So-and-so, while an American who could go by "Dr. William Clinton" would be considered pompous if he introduced himself as anything but "Bill".

For the full text, click here.

Plagiarism III - Guttenberg still wiggling

The case of Guttenberg is getting interesting. First, the swarm has reportedly found cases of plagiarism on 68 percent of the German Defense Minister's 475-page dissertation. Second, the passages are no longer limited to directly lifted paragraphs; if you were wondering why he didn't simply rewrite the passages he lifted, take a look at this.

It seems fairly clear now that Guttenberg's dissertation is a patchwork quilt, with some passages lifted verbatim and some rewritten to hide the lifting – and possibly with some passages being original work, though that honestly remains to be seen. We started out with a mere 12 passages of directly lifted paragraphs with no source attributed.

My favorite part of the story was Guttenberg's statement for the press (full text here):

"Jede weitere Kommunikation über das Thema werde ich von nun an ausschließlich mit der Universität Bayreuth führen."

"Starting now, I will only answer questions about this issue exclusively with the University of Bayreuth." Good luck with that, Karl-Theodor...

The CDU/CSU – Guttenberg's political party – believes all of this is a political campaign and charges that their political opposition is rushing to conclusions that only the university that awarded the doctorate can draw. But I no longer believe that "guilty until proven innocent" holds here. This is not a case of he-said/she-said where the public doesn't have all of the facts, and the court will have to decide after careful consideration. I work with texts every day and would never hand in work that looks like Guttenberg's.

The question is what the outcome will be. Different polls in different media show alternately that a majority of Germans want him to stay and want him to go, so we will have to see how that opinion looks when it stabilizes.

There is reason to believe both that other scandals are to come and that the case will blow over completely. Germany's Family Affairs Minister is now also charged with abusing her resources as a member of Parliament to facilitate the writing of her dissertation; Guttenberg apparently also had a study conducted by his office, and that study was partly lifted for his dissertation. It may turn out that such practices are quite widespread.

Incidentally, German professors are themselves notorious for having their "HiWis" (assistants) collect raw data and, in the worst cases, actually do some of the writing later published exclusively under the professor's name, but that practice also extends into the publishing world. I have been warned a few times to avoid collaborating with this or that US author because they tend to take your work and publish it as their own. So perhaps all of this exists on a seamless spectrum of practices in the publishing world.

Back in 1994, a book was published with the title "Dimwits from Bonn – the dissertations of Germany's elite." I haven't read the book, but it basically collects passages from dissertations written by Germany's top politicians of a few decades ago and shows how vapid they are. The charge in that book was apparently not plagiarism or abuse of parliamentary resources per se, but rather that Germany's elite can apparently turn in just about anything and get a doctorate for it.

Plagiarism II - how will Germany react?

Margaret Marks did me the favor of commenting on the case of plagiarism that Germany's Defense Minister currently faces. I was hoping in particular that she, as a legal expert, might have an opinion on whether his dissertation is as flimsy in general as his critics now charge (aside from the plagiarism accusations), but as she points out, 475 pages probably even wore down the people who had to read it.

She does bring up some interesting other facets, including general ghostwriting, which leads her to state, "I can't help wondering if this thesis was ghostwritten and Guttenberg can't accuse the person responsible." Yes, he may have given his word of honor (my bet is on Mitterrand in Kohl's bribery case). Having said that, there are certainly other members of parliament who managed to churn out a new book every four or five years – think of the late Hermann Scheer. I know from the man himself and from people who worked with him on a daily basis that he spent the evenings writing these books.

Nonetheless, I think Margaret – and the article she refers to – may be right, and I don't think the excuse exonerates Guttenberg in the least (Margaret does not say it should, either). The list of plagiarized passages apparently continued to grow over the course of the day according to this article in Die Zeit, and this website has been set up for anyone who wishes to help find copied passages in his dissertation. The search is crowd-sourcing now, and the swarm has found one spot of possible plagiarism every five pages on the average across the 475-page dissertation. I would not want to be in Karl-Theodor's shoes at the moment.

Margaret wonders "why he got the best possible mark without his apparent borrowings being spotted," and the terrible answer is all too obvious – in all likelihood, no one looked.  To paraphrase Finance Minister Schäuuble: the accusations of plagiarism are unjust to the character of the dissertation, everyone makes mistakes, and I read the dissertation myself. See, if you read it yourself and you like the guy, you don't need to check whether he plagiarized.

Guttenberg was already a prominent politician when he got his doctorate, and although Germany officially has no nobility, people's fascination with blue blood may even be greater in countries like Germany and the US, which are free to fantasize about aristocracy without any embarrassing flesh-and-blood royalty around to mar that fantasy.

And hey, when Guttenberg became Economics Minister in 2009, we all wanted to have our own Obama over here in Germany. Guttenberg fit the bill – suave, attractive, well spoken, and surprisingly young for all his achievements. I wonder if I would've checked for plagiarism if I had been a reviewer of his dissertation, or if he would've just blown me away. But that would only excuse the reviewers, not the submitter.

Whatever the case, unless Guttenberg has a really good excuse – a damn good excuse – here's the deal: if you are a budding politician with a pedigree but still lack a PhD in law as a shingle on the wall (as my dad would put it), don't worry – the professors would not insult you by questioning authorship. Just make sure the dissertation you throw at them is far, far too big for them to actually read. And remember to dress up nice for the orals (as my mom would say).

But if you are a working-class kid with a head on your shoulders, and you want to get into college-track prep school in Germany (Gymnasium), be on your toes in elementary school, because you will be required to be better than the offspring of the privileged.

Just for the record, I really liked Guttenberg myself until yesterday despite all of the recent mess-ups in his ministry, but this little mess is clearly on his shoulders and cannot be delegated. The most likely explanation for Guttenberg's predicament provides further reason to doubt the fairness of our society. The way Germany handles this matter could change the way I feel about this country. Judging from reader comments on news websites, the good news is I'm not alone with that sentiment.