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Episode 138 -- The Politics of Plagiarism Hunting (Patreon)

Published:
2026-06-04 06:14:44
Imported:
2026-09

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Content

In this episode, Adrian walks Moira through the strange politics of plagiarism hunting -- an (initially non-partisan) German preoccupation that became another line of attack in the right wing assault on higher education in the United States. The episode details how legitimate concerns about academic fraud were fused with a broader populist critique of "university corruption", which effortlessly fused with anti-woke and anti-"DEI" critiques of the university.

NOTE: As he feared, he was indeed incorrect on one particular point: German dentists do not have to write a dissertation, though a huge percentage of them do.

Comments

Lucinda

Just lodged my thesis for examination and I can confirm it is gay (or at least bisexual) to finish your dissertation

Astraea

Can confirm. They give you a free subscription to Grindr along with your diploma.

Jackie

I want to submit for your consideration that fucking guy's full government name: Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Buhl-Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg

Carsten Brombach

Only 20 mins in and loving it already. The bit about the academic title being in the passport (which is indeed a right in Germany, though not an obligation afaik) reminded me of a former German chancellor who barked at a journalist: „That’s still Herr Doktor Kohl to you!“, when that journalist started a question with: „Aber Herr Kohl…“

Koko Erdmann

Not the whale watching comment after german idiosyncracies! You could also say germans love PhDs as much as whalewatching with the whole Drama going on right now!

catalina neacsu

as a soon to start phd student, you cant be straight and finish a dissertation, im sorry

Nevrosiel

Also as a very german bureaucratic side note, only if you have done your PhD / Dissertation IN Germany are you allowed to call yourself a Doctor of X. If you have any other countries certificate you are not. How do I know -> happened to a friend of mine who got "corrected" by their German colleagues and had to change their door card 🤪

Laura

Officially logging a complaint with my German relatives that they are not more impressed with my PhD in math. I had no idea PhDs were perceived differently in German culture

Griffin Thayer

Queer PhD here as well. 100% agree they are for the girls and gays. Also, for bonus content, I would love to hear you take on the big internet plagiarism scandal from the prior year or so that started with Hbomberguy's video essay on plagiarism.

Charley

Is that the James Somerton one?

Lu

Did i love this episode? Yes. Did it give me paranoia that I accidentally plagiarized my master thesis? Yes.

Nico Leverkus

Ooohh, I did have a professor who made a stink about which titles I should use and in which order when emailing him I also would have loved a tengent about the bad bad TV movie about zu Guttenberg

Lu

Also, i found the whole germans love phds thing fascinating. In croatia a lot of our politicians are corrupt war profiteers, some of them bought their diplomas. There was a whole thing about it in the media years ago. Apparently there is a "university" in Travnik (nicknamed Bosnian Oxford) where a lot of our politicians got their degrees (mostly economics or kinesiology). Some journalists went to check it out and found out that it was very shady and questioned its legitimacy. There were so many corruption scandals since then that i honestly forgot if the reporting on it had any ending. Anyways, the craziest detail in the whole story, the thing that everybody remembers is: there is a pole dancing academy on the first floor of the same building as the university.

Vivian Cirilano

On Germans loving doctorates: my lawyer father handled a contract for some German colleagues decades ago. The German man had many advanced degrees and insisted that all of them be listed (Professor Dr Dr X, MS MS etc etc) My dad asked if they had any questions. The German guy points at his name and asks “how do you get the Esq.?”

Rhianna79

Okay, I have two Masters and now I work in retail (yeah, failing down) and sometimes joke when people ask about my education that people need to call me Master Master.

Ruth

Perfectly timed intro for this queer woman who just got her PhD approved

Jamie Madden

Send me to purchase a Subaru because I love whale watches. Where else to find progress and hope than the recovery of the Atlantic humpback whale?

David in Brooklyn

Thank you, Adrian, for the word "happenstantially" (at 33:53-4), which we needed but didn't have before.

Bob

German who holds PhD and a grudge against Guttenberg here. While off the radar he actually did a proper PhD. I looked at it only superficially but it includes a lot of references too very old literature. All of which can be found on Google books. This used to be an issue with students that didn't do the research properly... Also his second supervisor is a COVID truther and a total nut job https://ibb.co/WpsC7Yqx https://ibb.co/PvKt2rYn https://ibb.co/5xWYXFzZ https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/die-bizarre-geschichte-hinter-guttenbergs-neuem-doktortitel-8518177.html

Nina V~

the beautiful synchronicity of this being released when i'm in one of my occasional "y'know, i COULD go to medical school...." phases

OuijaFBabysMama

Nothing gayer than finishing a dissertation 💞

Kelsey

Ok thank you for writing this out because I was NOT spelling any part of his name right while googling lol

Nina V~

also, as someone born and raised in the american south, it warms my heart when adrian says "y'all"

OhLordyAmina

I hope to one day be a gay, homosexual with a PhD.🥺

Jackie

Doing my duty as a German 😔✌️

Astraea

Congrats!!

Jenny

Moira - come to Gloucester MA in September for some TOP QUALITY whale watching. I had a humpback surface 15 ft from my face and dive under the boat directly beneath my feet! 🐋

Sara Lyons

If you have spent ten years as a world-renowned expert in your (academic field), your colleagues can nominate you for a Doctorate of Science (a D.Sc., or a 'higher-level' doctorate). If you are a colossal jerk, you can nominate yourself. And if you are an extra-massive colossal jerk, you can nominate yourself. One of the professors in my old department tried to insist that people address him as Dr Dr Professor Dr Williams. Happily, he is now deceased.

Sara Lyons

Sorry, that sounded way more sinister than intended. He died of old age, and I had long left both the country and department.

Astraea

Okay, having actually listened to the episode now, a few comments: 1) Eternal solidarity with Adrian for printing things out on paper to review them. I'm younger than he is and I also do this - my brain just works better when I have physical paper in front of me. 2) "A lot of the people pushing AI have no idea how writing actually works." I feel this in my soul. It is also true for science, btw. I keep seeing people trying to push LLMs for scientific discovery as though we can outsource the grunt work (of....thinking? I guess?) to generative AI. I have many rants about this, but the punch line is: generative AI fundamentally operates on the principle that what it's doing now is substantially similar to what it's been asked to do before. Science fundamentally operates on the principle of understanding each individual data point, data set, subject/source/target, and hypothesis on its own unique terms. These are fundamentally incompatible approaches. Everyone shilling AI as a replacement for deep human thinking seems to fundamentally not understand how human thinking works. 3) "The presence of women in universities is a sign of their degradation and lack of rigor." I am an astronomer, and all I can say about that is: Marie Curie has entered the chat. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin has entered the chat. Annie Jump Cannon has entered the chat. Maria Mitchell has entered the chat. Ada Lovelace has entered the chat. Caroline Herschel has entered. . . .

Astraea

Also, true story, my advisor once deleted the opening sentence of one of my papers not because it was wrong, but because every paper in the field in the last five years had opened with some version of that statement and she was tired of reading it. Some things can look like plagiarism or insufficient rephrasing not because someone is stealing work, but because there are only so many ways to make the same point. If everyone in your sub-field is focused on one particular problem, let me tell you, you're going to read a LOT of really similar-sounding introductions.

OhLordyAmina

That’s still really, really awesome though! I’ve been debating whether I want a Master’s or not

s

Immediately after submitting my undergraduate (non mandatory) thesis, I discovered three in-text citations (all in tangential footnotes) lacking corresponding bibliographic entries. Consumed by guilt, in the throes of my Adderall comedown, I promptly reported myself to my advisor and to the head of the literature honors program for academic dishonesty/plagiarism. They both told me to calm down and later wrote letters of recommendation for me

wibbelkind

As a German I absolutely love these episodes where Adrian goes off on a tangent of "Here's what happened in Germany" and I'm like "Yes please explain to me what happened there because the German news sure didn't!"

wuselig

Adrian was still close- In Austria med students get a phd equivalent with graduation. In Germany it is just very encouraged with a lot of force in many universities for med students. And yes, people really go scrambling for topics to research😅

Julia

It captured the whole plagiarism hunt really well, just a few remarks: The title thing gets better with younger generations and due to the Bologna process and the “new” degrees for the German speaking world. Part of that: phd is formally the same as a doctorate but the title is not felt as equal. Same with the other degrees. Hence there can be in some subjects the pre-Bologna structures in place. A bachelors thesis is not considered as scholarly, so everywhere I know the publication of that is not mandatory, only for masters and phd. ( academic standards still apply for bachelors) Stefan Weber is relentless going against universities. There are also rumours he got assignments from foreign governments and his victims are regularly not public figures but people where someone gains something if they lose their job or suffer. And his blog is so petty and you really should have also looked at a photo of him ;)

Rebecca Skirvin

Fun fact: Drew Gilpin Faust was Harvard’s first female president. She served from 2007 to 2018. She’s a well-respected historian of the 19th century US South.

Rhianna79

I think it depends on what you want to do. My first is in Library Science, I worked at a University for 5 years and got my 2nd masters then in Environmental and Energy Policy since free classes where part of the benefits package. Look at the job market and interview someone in it so you dont go in blind. I did for the library job but I guess I let optimism get the better of.me anyway. I really loved what I got out of both though. Thought I'm still paying my Library degree off 20 years later.

JanaKat

In software development as in academia unfortunately. The same companies that were incredibly litigious about software patents are now the loudest AI boosters, and are stealing everything they can get their hands on. Almost like it was never about justice and always about power.

Ben Schwabe

I can't run for office because I know I did a mediocre job footnoting my undergraduate thesis, which is worse than having a Nazi tattoo.

Ben Schwabe

Sadly Leon is actually still at Bard, he just resigned the presidency. He's still a music professor (no idea if he actually teaches or just collects a salary) and residing in the house formerly known as "The President's House."

Linn Leppert

I read the episode title and was sure Adrian would talk about Karl-Theodor. I got a PhD from the same university as that guy just two years after the plagiarism scandal and I can tell you that apart from the wider political repercussions it had, it also changed the entire way in which the university awarded doctorates. After Karl-Theodor, they introduced graduate schools, supervision agreements and a whole lot of other regulations which from our side of the campus (the natural sciences… *sigh*) sounded pretty ludicrous (what? you are not talking to your PhD supervisor every couple of days?). Anyway, quite the throwback, that episode 😅

Wu Wei Wolf

I work in climate modeling, and I remember that in the late 2010s, and especially in some of the first post-COVID-lockdown conferences, there was both a lot of interest in machine learning and a lot of skepticism about whether machine learning was really improving our scientific understanding. I was a bit on the skeptical side, but I thought there was a place for that kind of machine learning (e.g. if you can train a model to predict something, maybe that will help to reverse-engineer what the model is doing and lead to real scientific understanding).

Wu Wei Wolf

Then genAI came along, which has few applications that don't involve outright replacing real science, and the 2nd Trump administration has led to a situation where you can only reliably get funding in environmental science by promising to help build an AI system to replace you. It's gotten pretty dire, and the old more nuanced conversation has been supplanted by the grim reality that you have to at least pretend to support AI schlock over real science to stay funded.

Astraea

Yep. ML was the New Hotness in astronomy about ten years ago. I was skeptical then, similar to you. Nowadays, there are fairly well-accepted ways to use ML in astronomy. But those ways are a) highly trained on very specific data sets (if you're doing something new you essentially have to train your own ML model first, you can't just use someone else's), b) highly supervised, and c) never used alone as a magical black box. Also, *crucially,* ML methods are transparent and based on actual physics, and they *give you uncertainties*. "I measured this value and it has this uncertainty" is something that is acceptable in science. LLMs *don't give you uncertainties,* and they don't tell you how they arrived at their answer. A colleague of mine said his main objection to LLMs is that "the uncertainty is where the science is," which is very true. (I personally don't use ML because I still don't fully trust it, but the people who do use it in my field seem to be doing so very responsibly. We are also a VERY open-source community - if you use ML, you had better put that model up on GitHub before publication, buddy!)

Wu Wei Wolf

I don't know how much this is due to the culture in the US, or in my particular fields (applied math/climate science), or working in a lab rather than academia, or my particular neurosis, but outside of very formal contexts, I *never* use titles of any kind, and almost never get called "Doctor" either.

Astraea

There are a few astronomers who see great promise in genAI, but not many, and I truly don't know what the hell they're thinking. It's definitely true that LLMs are where the most - and most reliable - money is at the moment. But I still really can't see many uses for it in science. Visualization is a good application, but only for outreach/pretty-picture-type work. If I'm supposed to take an actual measurement, I'm not touching LLM images with a ten-foot pole.

Wu Wei Wolf

Even in those rare cases where I have to cold-email other scientists and want to leave a good impression (e.g. because I want them to share code/data to reproduce their results), I generally start with "Greetings [Full Name]" or "Dear [Last Name]". If they are not the kind of jerk who notices, they won't care, and if they are some kind of macho jerk, I don't want to set up an expectation that I will provide them with some kind of obeisance rather than approaching them as an equal

Astraea

I use my title of "Dr." in exactly two contexts: when some know-it-all asshole is being condescending and saying I'm not smart enough to understand something, and when I am meeting new medical doctors for the first time. The first case is because I'm as much of a vindictive, petty bitch as the next person. The second case is because I'm a woman and I have idiopathic chronic pain, and I will take any authority I can get when trying to convince doctors that I'm not a hysterical fool and I do actually need medical care. My students call me "Dr." all the time, but this is despite my very best efforts. I try to tell them to call me by my first name, it's totally fine, but most of them don't. I assume this is an attitude they learned from their other professors.

Katherine Peterson

To Laura, I know, right? Have I really been running around with unsuspected clout for all these years? OTOH, the PhD in science (genetics) , faces slightly different challenges with regard to plagiarism. Submitted papers are subject to automatic screening BUT! They can’t figure out how to except the methods section. Methods is the last place you want original creative prose. The crisis of reproducibility might not be a crisis but it is a problem.

West

As the episode got into the “frustrated former academics whose careers stalled” topic, couldn’t help but think of Gleichschaltung from the early episodes of Project 1933. The career advancement possibilities if you are able to remove the intellectually undesirables from a post you feel you are entitled to.

Charlotte

Here's pretty much the only thing I currently use my (British) PhD title for: Dr is the only available accepted gender-neutral form of address in both German and English. In Germany it usually appears in drop-down menus alongside Herr/Frau. So in an effort to choose a gender-neutral form of address, I guess I look like one of these people who puts their title everywhere. Ah well.

Charlotte

🤝 PhDs in maths! Wonder how many of us there are on this patreon

Charlotte

This is of course another example of a PhD being gay, or rather queer! Non-binary people, get your PhD for an "easy" way to not be misgendered on form letters!

Y

Hi, I’m an immigrant doing a PhD in Germany. The reason why there are so many PhD holders that are non-academics is the German “Science Contracts Act” (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz), which makes it so that one is not allowed to hold a post-doc position for over 6 years. Meaning that one can effectively only stay in academia if they secure a professorship. As you know, there are only a tiny handful of those positions, so people who receive PhDs in Germany are often faced with two career choices: move abroad to continue working in academia, or stay in Germany and succumb to a job in the industry. It doesn’t mean that nobody who has done their PhD in german has not done it purely out of pursuit of a status, but it’s important to have this perspective. Many people with PhDs who end up working outside of academia are not doing so by choice. Yes, the culture of having all your titles in front of one’s name like “Prof. Dr. Dr.” is odd, but you’ve got to understand this is just “culture”. For example, for a UK-based academic it is very odd that in the US lecturers insist on being called “Professor Lastname”. In the UK every professor or post-doc will insist on being called by their first name and would cringe at any sort of a title being used when addressed. It doesn’t make “Prof Dr Dr” sound any less funny to me, but it’s just a cultural difference. People are overall very down to earth, and will not ask you to actually say all of these titles in a normal conversation

Y

Anyways, I am only 20 minutes into the episode, so perhaps you mention all of this eventually, but I got the impression that you were not aware of this aspect of german academia. Loving the show!

Steffi Hofmeister

Content of the episode is amazing, as usual, and I need a “being a real freak about some little bugaboo” IBWTR tee-shirt stat

Astraea

As a US academic, I will say, it's not necessarily that academics insist on being called "Prof." It's more that that's still the default culture-wide, even if individual people or fields of study don't care. My field is pretty casual and most people don't insist on titles, but getting students to drop "Prof" or "Dr" is still very difficult because of the overall cultural assumption in the US.

James Talley

I read "my lawyer father" like a German's passport: Lawyer Father Professor Doctor Doctor _____"

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

I know that academia (which is where I live) may only be of limited interest to your audience . But I’d love to hear your take on emerging scholars who don’t want to cite senior scholars with bad politics (esp sexual Pestery). I understand the desire —but worry we are erasing disciplinary histories. Sure—prior and current generations of academics are fraught —but I’m not sure the solution is ‘de-platforming’. How should we handle this? Not unlike the artist vs work debate…

Alexis Nast

I'd love more insight into the use of plagiarism detecting software especially as it becomes more prevalent in at least US academia.

Rootintootin

Remind me to come here next time I am wondering whether or not I should get a PhD