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.