Romanias PM may be the latest in a long line of academic miscreants
Would a few quotation marks really have hurt Victor Ponta? The new Romanian prime minister is the latest to be in the dock over plagiarism changes,after Nature magazine found that his doctoral thesis on the International Criminal Court cribbed entire sections from two Romanian law scholars. Ponta claims that he preferred endnotes to footnotes but if he has failed to separate his own writing from theirs,he has committed the cardinal academic sin. Two education ministers in Romania have recently quit in succession,also accused of academic plagiarism.
While universities and workplaces now see plagiarism in morally absolute terms,it wasnt always so. Originality and theft are not opposing concepts,and creativity often rests on borrowing. However,academic dishonesty is a different matter it is not a matter of intellectual influences,but about the fundamental obligation to flag other peoples insights,to cite your sources. Pontas alleged scholarly fraudulence may not only blight his own political career,it could also discredit Romanias once-formidable science and education system.