There’s a kind of moral hierarchy when it comes to the legitimacy of your university’s advanced degrees.
At the very top you find degrees conferred by professors who have themselves earned advanced degrees as result of doing first-rate work at excellent universities. These professors have read your thesis.
This is the model that prevails, with exceptions, in the United States of America. Most of our professors graduated from legitimate schools; most take seriously the job of reading, critiquing, and grading theses. Sometimes they send theses back for revision before passing them. Sometimes they fail them.
Below this high point lie countries like Germany, where no doubt legit professors are too busy or important or whatever to read some of the theses they pass. Hence the big, ongoing scandal of German politicians found to have plagiarized their dissertations. (One of them seems to have earned a sabbatical.)
A notch further down is today’s news story: The Czech Republic.
The law faculty of the University of West Bohemia (ZČU) in Plzeň has made headlines in recent years for all the wrong reasons — accused of acting like a diploma mill for Czech politicians and entrepreneurs looking to advance their careers (or massage their egos) by obtaining academic titles without actually attending classes or doing any original research. Now, its recognition of degrees from Ukraine is drawing fire from the Supreme Prosecution Service (NSZ).
NSZ chief Pavel Zeman has revealed that the courts have annulled 25 decisions by the university to recognize degrees from the Carpathian State University of Ukraine…
Here you have a systemic practice of handing out (actually, probably selling) degrees to anyone who shows up.
Shocked by all of this naughtiness, the education ministry has been checking the status of “more than 315,000 people who graduated from Czech intuitions [sic].”
Somewhere way below this is Italy, with its nattering nabobs of nepotism.
When you get to the very bottom, you hit Pakistan, whose entire political class seems to have purchased their degrees from diploma mills.
June 30th, 2011 at 4:40PM
Margaret, Margaret… If our only source about US higher education was your blog, we’d believe that most of it is about sports, alcoholism, ghostwriting of articles on pharmaceuticals, medicine and psychiatry, and so on. Yet, you now tell us that thesis plagiarism hardly exists in the same country. That sounds contradictory.
June 30th, 2011 at 6:14PM
DM: I’m making a very specific point here, and a comparative one. I believe, from years of reading about universities, foreign and domestic, that the process by which one attains an advanced degree in the US is likely to have more integrity than it does in other countries. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t exceptions – I mention some in my post – but it does mean that if you’re comparing university systems (consider any international listing of university quality), by and large the American is more reliable.
And by the way – yes. Most of US higher education is indeed about sports. It’s just that there are so MANY schools here. Thirty or so universities and colleges have been able to rise to very great intellectual heights despite so much money and energy being diverted to sports.
July 1st, 2011 at 3:46PM
I think that one should also make a difference between the exact sciences, where everybody that counts tries to say afloat in an international competitive/collaborative world, and the social sciences and humanities. My impression is that the international openness of the former is a guarantee against the kind of abuses you’re discussing.
It may be easy in a second-rate university to assemble a committee for granting a degree in, say, law or sociology to a plagiarist. It is considerably harder to have a plagiarized article published in a first-rate international mathematical journal…
July 1st, 2011 at 3:48PM
All good points, DM.