Slashdot Mirror
Prime Ministerial Plagiarism Farce Continues In Romania
ananyo writes "Two investigations into the case of alleged plagiarism by Romania's prime minister, Victor Ponta, have reached opposite conclusions, ramping up the tension in a fierce struggle over political power in Bucharest. As Slashdot has noted before, Ponta stands accused of having copied large sections of his 2003 PhD thesis on the International Criminal Court. ... On 29 June, the Romanian National Council for the Attestation of University Titles (CNATDCU), which is in charge of investigating plagiarism charges in PhD theses according to Romanian law, had concluded that Ponta had copied and pasted 85 pages of his thesis from three books without properly marking the copied sections as quotes. But the committee was dissolved during the course of its meeting by acting education minister Liviu Pop. Meanwhile, concerns are rising in the European Union over what political observers say is a lack of respect in Romania for the fundamental principles of democracy."
I'm a nerd. From Romania. During the last 2 months I just watched in disbelief how my country's stability spiraled out of control because of the shadows looming behind the guy accused of plagiarism.
The situation is ridiculous. For very very strong political reasons, he's been placed in charge of our government. The coalition of political and business people behind him is terrified because our justice system started to work (some very high profile people such as a former prime minister went to jail) and so he's tasked with being an important cog in the mechanism designed to overthrow our president, Traian Basescu, the person mainly responsible for healing the justice system.
The guy accused of plagiarism, Victor Ponta, is an unbelievably despicable human being. He's a new type of face on our political landscape. Relatively young but raised by former top ranking communists. He is shameless in public discourses and has no moral values. Everything he ever did in his life he owes to his masters (including his wife. no kidding.) and thus has no instinct of preserving his accomplishments or public image. Recently, he shamed us on an European level causing top ranking EU officials to "beat" him into submission on some very very important issues.
The problem with fighting him is that he can't really be accused of much because he's just a puppet with no merits raised by his masters. But there is a crack in this puppet. There's an old tradition with former communists to cover themselves with undeserved academic titles. They feel it washes them and makes them respectable. And that's exactly what he did. He had his doctoral thesis manufactured by someone and in this process about a 1/3 of the thesis was just taken with copy/paste from various books and publications without citation. Nature (www.nature.com) first signaled this and various other high profile European newspapers followed up.
The plagiarism accusation is not so important in itself if it were not for the context where it occurs. The guy is a critically important cog in the mechanism designed to save a lot of rich / influent people from jail. However, we are an EU country and there have been precedents in EU with similarly ranked officials forced to resign because of improperly obtained academic merits. So there's strong pressure on him to resign if his doctoral thesis is officially proven to contain plagiarism. Trouble is the official way of proving the plagiarism is controlled by his government so there's no chance for that to occur but there's a strong backfire in lost reputation in the Romanian academic world if everyone just goes along with this blatant charade (the plagiarism is dead obvious and has been proven both by Nature / newspapers and even the University that granted his diploma).
The bottom line is that the tension is very high with a very elaborate, political and special interests groups led, conspiracy to capture the justice system being in danger because this guy plagiarized his doctoral thesis. This really matters to me because I'll have to move out of the country if those groups succeed.