… now swirls around the Chief Rabbi of France: plagiarism, academic fraud…
Which goes to prove one of the fundamental rock solid oft-stated UD principles:
Find one instance of plagiarism for any one person, and you’ll find lots more; and, almost certainly, you’ll find that the same person has engaged in other forms of malfeasance.
Details on the plagiarism here. And now that people are scrutinizing Gilles Bernheim, other stuff has emerged.
Further investigation …showed Bernheim noted on his CV a high academic status that he may not actually hold.
His Who’s Who entry, based on information he provided, says he was awarded from Sorbonne University an “agregation de philosophie”, a prestigious but extremely difficult to obtain achievement that permits the teaching of philosophy in French institutions.
However university “agregation” lists from 1972 to 2000 have no entry for Bernheim.
The head of the association managing the lists, Blanche Lochmann, said the Grand Rabbi’s name was not in the agregation lists kept by the French education ministry either.
“It is very difficult for a public figure to try to fool people as to whether he has an agregation,” she said.
“This is the first instance that is so blatant.”
May 19th, 2013 at 7:06AM
A few precisions:
The “agrégation” is actually a competitive recruitment exam for being a teacher in secondary education, and possibly also teaching in the first years of higher education (French universities have full-time teaching positions known as “PRAG” for such people).
It is not awarded by a university, but by a national exam.
It exists in a variety of disciplines. I for instance am “agrégé” of mathematics. (Supposedly, the agrégation in mathematics is easier than in philosophy, because of the large number of positions open.)
In the humanities, it is often de facto required to hold an “agregation” to do a PhD or to be recruited as assistant professor, even though there is no link, legally speaking, between this “agrégé” position for secondary education and the assistant professor recruitment process, which only requires a doctorate.
[There also exists an “agrégation” for recruitment of associate/full university professors in a handful of disciplines, such as law. This is a wholly different business.]