CSU General Secretary Martin Huber wants to voluntarily forego using his doctorate. He is reacting to the review of his doctoral thesis by the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, which had become known shortly before. The responsible doctoral committee at Munich University, which Huber had asked for an examination, came to the conclusion “that the handling of the formalities as a scientific technique does not meet the scientific requirements of a dissertation”.
The member of parliament “Dr. Martin Huber” stated the literature that was adopted in the dissertation, but he did not comply with the scientific conventions when dealing with research literature, according to which literal and content-related adoptions are to be distinguished. The fact that the readers are left in the dark about the relationship between their own work and the work of other authors raises the suspicion of deception.
However, the doctoral committee also emphasized that the intention to deceive could not be proven without a doubt, since Huber had consistently specified his templates and the supervisor of the work assessed this working method as acceptable. In the opinion of the doctoral committee responsible for the examination, the work should have been returned for revision, it should not have been accepted as a dissertation.
Plagiarism researcher Zenthöfer reviewed the dissertation
The reason for the review were allegations by the plagiarism researcher Jochen Zenthöfer, who initially spoke in the “Bild am Sonntag” of quotations without or with incorrect source information in the dissertation. At the time, Zenthöfer told the German Press Agency that the standards of good scientific work had not been met in the dissertation. The errors went beyond individual citation errors.
Huber confirmed on Friday: “I wrote my doctoral thesis to the best of my knowledge and belief. The assessment of the university is surprising and disappointing for me, but I accept and respect it. As a personal consequence, I will no longer hold my doctorate.” It is “good that the exam is now complete, my full concentration is still on my work as CSU general secretary.”
The doctoral committee did not have to decide whether the doctoral examination should subsequently be declared failed and the doctorate should be revoked, since the doctoral regulations valid in 2007, the year the work was completed, stipulate a statute of limitations of five years for this decision. From a legal point of view, a proven cheating as a necessary prerequisite for a possible withdrawal of the doctoral degree is not given.
Martin Huber, who had dealt with the Bundestag election campaigns of the CDU/CSU as opposition parties in his master’s thesis in 1972, 1976, 1980 and 2002, wrote his doctoral thesis on the topic “The influence of the CSU on the Western policy of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1954 to 1969 with regard to relations with France and the USA.”
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