Education minister faces copycat allegations over ‘Freudian slip’

Germany’s federal Education Minister Annette Schavan faces allegations that part of her doctoral thesis may have been plagiarised. Schavan denies the claims made earlier this month but the University of Düsseldorf, which awarded her doctorate, is having her thesis reviewed.

Schavan, a Christian Democrat, is alleged to have claimed that quotations from Sigmund Freud’s works were in fact from the original source, that is, Freud himself. Instead, she may have read them in secondary literature that she used for her thesis, and failed to refer to the secondary source.

This created the impression that she had read Freud for her thesis.

The allegations made refer to passages on 46 pages of the thesis.

They are not nearly as severe as those that arose in the case of Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg, who was ultimately forced to step down as defence minister because of lifting.

VroniPlag, the internet platform that identified the passages in question, voted against publishing them. The passages were only brought to light by a VroniPlag ‘dissident’, who prefers to remain anonymous.

Nevertheless, the University of Düsseldorf, where Schavan did her doctorate 32 years ago, has appointed a commission to review her doctoral thesis, Person und Gewissen – Studien zu Voraussetzungen, Notwendigkeit und Erfordernissen, focusing on individuals and their conscience.

The allegations against Schavan would ultimately weigh heavily, should they prove justified, because of her outspoken remarks about Zu Guttenberg last year.

She said at the time that, having finished her doctorate 31 years previously and having supported several doctoral candidates in their careers, she was “not only secretly ashamed”, adding that lifting was “no minor offence” and stressing the value of intellectual property.

According to a Munich professor of law, Volker Rieble, Schavan, who was appointed an honorary professor of the Free University of Berlin in 2009, could be stripped of her doctorate if the allegations prove correct.

And opposition Social Democrat Dagmar Ziegler said that if they hold, “Schavan will no longer be tenable as a minister, let alone as minister of education.”