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."

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Quality leadership?

[Frohboy]

It takes generations to break the cycle (if in fact the cycle will be broken).

Exactly. I'm a Canadian living in Romania for the past five years, and have been following Romanian politics as well as I can (as an "outsider") during this time. Of course, since I also have no long-term stake in the outcome of Romania's political chaos (as I will move home eventually, and could just move home sooner if things get really bad), I like to think that I'm a little more objective (though I'm undoubtedly somewhat influenced by friends and coworkers who do have a vested interest).

Here are some relevant background tidbits for this story:

• - There is currently a political struggle between the prime minister (Ponta) and president (Basescu) regarding the relative powers of the presidency and the parliament. (Not knowing anything about the Romanian constitution's delineation of powers, I honestly don't know who is overstepping what.)
• - The parliament has suspended the president, pending a recall referendum on the 29th.
• - The timing of this plagiarism scandal is very convenient, with regards to the damage it has done to Ponta's credibility, immediately prior to the impeachment. (This is where I am inclined to believe the conspiracy theories that the president's cronies probably had something to do with the plagiarism coming to light now. I'm not saying that the plagiarism didn't happen, as it seems quite certain that it did, but rather that the timing of the revelation is not coincidence.)
• - The prime minister "earned" a PhD while sitting as a cabinet minister in parliament. His PhD supervisor (Adrian Nastase) was the sitting prime minister at the time. I chuckle at the thought of Victor Ponta excusing himself from a state dinner to go write a few pages on his dissertation. I also chuckle at the thought of a cabinet minister and prime minister sitting down to have grad student/supervisor discussions on edits to the dissertation. In my opinion, neither of them were actually directly involved in the writing of the thesis -- it was some party drones paid to throw something together that Ponta could claim as his own, and Nastase could endorse before a "committee" (of professors loyal to the party, or at least loyal to the favours Nastase could bestow). Those party drones recognized that it was purely a symbolic PhD (since Ponta is a politician, not an academic), so they lifted content from other sources.
• - Nastase last month was convicted of using millions in state money to fund his run for the presidency in 2004, and sentenced to 2 years in prison. He supposedly tried to commit suicide to avoid prison, but "missed" (with a gun at point-blank range). This is a whole other bizarre scandal, not directly related to the plagiarism affair, but connected to the current political craziness in Romania.

As the parent alluded to, the root problem is that both sides of this particular farce are backed by people who got their power under the former communist regime. Nastase and Basescu were both well-connected prior to the revolution. Ponta was a child in 1989, and hence has no connections of his own to the old regime, but was trained through his political career by Nastase.

As a foreigner, I mostly shake my head at the current situation, and am not terribly optimistic about either outcome in the upcoming referendum. Politics in Romania truly does seem to be a choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich [wikipedia.org]. I would like to see things improve, as the country and people are fantastic. I am confident that Romanian politics will eventually get better, but probably not within my time here.

Re:WTF?

[Shag]

I arrived in Romania just in time for the "coup" but only for a couple weeks, and now that I've flown back out, I can non-anonymously second what the AC said. (Although to be fair, Ponta is hardly the first Romanian politician to plagiarize, from what I hear.)

As an aside, I was able to walk unhindered right into a session of the National Executive Council of the Social Democratic Party while Ponta was speaking, and take a photo of him [www.iisd.ca] to prove I was there, so if he wants to stay in power, he'd better hope no disillusioned Romanian with any social engineering skills is packing more than a camera.