Guttenberg's plagiarism ripped in Bayreuth report

There was no reprieve or silver lining in the final report on Guttenberg's plagiarism that issued from the University of Bayreuth on May 11, 2011. The story in the Local began:

Stephan Rixen, chairman of Bayreuth University’s investigating board said it was clear that the thesis was full of deliberate plagiarism and that even if it had been his own work, it had not deserved the summa cum laude grading it had received.

There was no doubt that the plagiarism was intentional:

Much had been taken from what he called ‘grey literature’ - papers that had not been published in specialist journals but were to be found on the internet.

He also said that Guttenberg had scattered his thesis with passages from newspapers – often old ones. Other unattributed sources included journals, as well as the academic service of the Bundestag where Guttenberg had been an MP at the time, he said.

The plagiarised passages were so widely taken apart and distributed throughout the thesis, as well as often being slightly changed, with one or two words altered, that it was clear that Guttenberg had done it deliberately, he said.

The idea of "undeserving" could have been applied to the work of Glenn Poshard, but it wasn't. Poshard, unlike Guttenberg, got a do-over from the folks at Southern Illinois University.

The article in The Local spoke of a different plagiarized thesis:

And Konstanz University has already acted in the case of Veronica Saß, the daughter of former Bavarian state premier and one-time German chancellor candidate Edmund Stoiber, stripping her of her doctor title.

One recalls that Konstanz also stripped Bell Labs fraudster Jan Hendrik Schon of his Ph.D. degree. Schon didn't copy others; he merely made stuff up, and the managers at Bell Labs believed the stuff.