The resignation of a minister over PhD plagiarism reveals how much more Germany values academia than we do
Some time around the year 1450, Johannes Gutenberg had a bright idea. In his workshop in Mainz, Gutenberg decided to print a book using several movable pieces of metal type instead of one fixed woodcut – a flexible system that considerably sped up an otherwise complicated process. The result of his labours, the Gutenberg Bible, marks a turning point in European history: movable type rapidly accelerated the dissemination of printed matter, enabling the spread of literacy and sparking the Reformation and the Renaissance.
What a neat historical flourish, then, that a half a millennium later it would take another Guttenberg – unrelated, and this time spelled with a double t – to highlight that print culture is now moving at a different speed. Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the German defence minister who has announced his resignation, didn't pioneer the use of movable type, but certainly used it to excess. As much as 5% of his PhD thesis on phases of the constitutional development of America and the EU (still on Amazon but sadly out of stock) had been lifted straight from other books and websites without appropriate accreditation – Der Spiegel features a beautiful visualisation of the copied passages on its website. And the whole episode has become a nice footnote to history by someone who evidently cared too little about footnotes.
There are many fascinating facts to be noted about "KT" zu Guttenberg: that he was Germany's youngest-ever minister for trade when he joined Angela Merkel's cabinet in 2009, aged only 37; that his aristocratic family's fortune is estimated at €400m (£339m); that he has no fewer than 10 first names: Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg.
Since entering the world of frontbench politics, Guttenberg has hardly been out of the German news, not always for the wrong reasons. He was the first German politician to spell out in public that Germany was "at war" in Afghanistan, rather than just "engaged in a mission" – encouraging some commentators on this side of the Channel to splutter about a revival of Prussian military values. But he also took the radical step of getting rid of Germany's compulsory military service, a move that some argue may lead to the eventual abolition of the country's national army. With his gelled, louche, cashmere-jumper-over-the-shoulder look, he reminds many of the obnoxious "BWL"-types that hung out at their university's business studies department. But his direct style also won him many fans, and his popularity ratings had been impressive.
In many ways the most fascinating nugget of information is not what Guttenberg did once in power, but that out of all possible sins, he would be brought down by a PhD thesis. There has been much sniggering about the fact that German politicians get sacked for plagiarising their PhDs while British politicians don't even get sacked for plagiarising intelligence from a PhD.
The German obsession with PhDs is particularly striking from a British perspective. When my family first moved to England, people were often confused by the "Prof. Dr. Ing." on my father's business card, assuming that he was either a practising medic or simply a fraud. Flick through any respectable German newspapers and you'll spot Drs and Profs all over the place, whereas I know plenty of journalists working at British newspapers (including this one) who would deliberately obscure their academic credentials.
The German love of the PhD plays up both to the old stereotype of a people easily led astray by the trimmings of officialdom, and the German self-image as the teacher's pet in the European classroom: a country that might have been a bit slow when it came to politics and industrialisation, but always led the way in matters of learning. While it is now accepted that the first ever PhD was awarded in Bologna in 1219, there's a consensus that Germany was the first to institutionalise academic research, at the University of Göttingen during the Romantic period, when education or "Bildung" was elevated into a kind of art.
So did Guttenberg resign over a lot of hot air? In the last 24 hours Merkel's camp has certainly whistled to that tune: there have been murmurs about an "orchestrated campaign", and the opposition trying to "pull Guttenberg down". In his own resignation speech, the defence minister slyly blamed the media for focusing too much on his personality, at the expense of the more serious matter of soldiers dying in Afghanistan and the events in north Africa.
This trivialises a more serious matter. Perhaps the most fascinating fact about Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is that the controversial PhD wasn't the work of idle youth, but the by-product of eager careerism. Guttenberg started his PhD in 1999 and didn't hand it in until 2006 – most likely because since 2002 he had been an active member of the Bundestag, the German parliament.
Many PhD students get into a position like this, where they suddenly realise that the work they had started as a sideline, perhaps as a means of supporting their research, has taken over their academic work (I know, because it happened to me). For many this is the point at which they realise they can no longer justify taking up academic resources, where it makes more sense to abandon the PhD altogether. Why couldn't Guttenberg have just done the same?
A 2001 survey revealed that 58.5% of chief executives in Germany had PhDs, compared with only 1.3% in the US. Yet the overall percentage of the population embarking on a PhD are fairly similar (Germany's is 1.3%, the US's 1.5%). These figures hint at a trend whereby German PhDs are becoming little more than career boosters, as opposed to genuine research intended to further knowledge.
Ultimately, it wasn't the opposition or the media that brought Guttenberg down, but vocal complaints from Germany's academics, who felt that a plagiarised PhD was a symbol of that trend. They were outraged because they felt Guttenberg had undermined the integrity of their profession, and rightly so. The fact that their voice is still taken seriously also makes for a marked contrast to the situation in Britain, where the government seems to hold less and less faith in the value of academia. In that light, Guttenberg's resignation has to be taken as a good sign.