Politicians called out for copying

The University of Dusseldorf stripped Schavan of her Ph.D. after a blogger caught the plagiarism and spent months vigilantly presenting the evidence to the public. The blog “schavanplag” (for “Schavan” and “plagiarism”) compared passages of Schavan’s 1980 dissertation with sections of written works by other authors — in multiple instances they matched word for word, or nearly. The blog alleges Schavan did not properly source her work and claimed others’ work as her own. The board of the department that awarded her the degree said that there were too many borrowed passages in her dissertation, and found that she had “systematically and deliberately laid claim to intellectual achievements, which she in reality did not produce herself.”