EasyPhD - the German way

In the English speaking media, there is rarely a ripple when another German politician is embroiled in a row over his or her PhD.

The most high-profile plagiarism scandal, meaning forgetting to quote large portions of works done by others, dates a couple of years back and involved government secretaries. Another, smaller one, was about a party chief who got himself a "mini"-PhD in a neighboring country and then plastered the German Dr. title all over his credentials.

Why are German career politicians so eager to wrap themselves in a PhD?

Simply put, because it is worth its weight in gold within the German system. It is next to inconceivable for Germans to not put their Dr. (which is used for MD, JD, VD. PhD, and so on) on their passports, ID cards, driver licenses, and underwater basket weaving certificates.

The allure and the incentives are there, the only problem is, obtaining an honest PhD is hard work.

That tends to interfere, some appear to believe, with the party career, with the backroom deal sessions and the hobnobbing with the party grandees.

How, then do you reconcile these conflicting demands?

We checked and found a few pointers:
1) Same school as your dad or siblings. If your parents, mostly the father in case of the traditional German political parties, is somewhere above mid-ranking officialdom, he has friends in academia, and you'll get a PhD. You can still get caught, though, as happened to the daughter of a party chairman.

2) If daddy has no friend who will discover your superior intellect, just pick an easy PhD subject.

You would not believe the number of German politicians whose PhD is about the development of their party's youth organization in the ten or twenty years preceding the PhD. One of those guys made it all the way to Chancellor (the equivalent to our U.S. president job).
Since these politicians work on the history of their own party, does this indicate an absence of scientific curiosity?
No, they are curious to find out how little work it needs to get the framed seal for the office.

Other thesis topics which the blogster has correlated with strongly party focused people are overly broad "dead horse" subjects, such as a comparison of the German constitution to the U.S. constitution.
Then there are fields perceived to be new, which usually applies when politicians talk about tremendous changes in society which happened at least two decades ago. For instance, German chancellor Merkel referred to the internet as "new territory" in early 2014. So, any legal JD thesis on the vagaries and uncertainties of a particular internet aspect is a breeze.

These simple steps should get you a PhD in no time and a great career in public life afterwards.

Just to illustrate how cynical the blogster has become in a few short years, in the last election, one candidate sported a"Dr."

Vote Dr. YouLikeMe!

OMG. What did that one write about, and how many trees were sacrificed in the process?

Turns out, we were looking at a real medical doctor, one who even had worked in his field before going into politics.

One more thing:
Just as we were set to hit "Publish", we did a quick check of today's German papers and found a pretty devastating article about the treatment of young scientists and doctoral candidates at Germany's flagship Max Plank Gesellschaft facilities.

[Update 5/8/2018]
There is a whole book about the subject! Dünnbrettbohrer in Bonn - Aus den Dissertationen unserer Elite, Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt 1985.
In addition to Helmut, The Pear, Kohl, the book delves into the intellectual works of R. Barzel, M. Wörner, M. Bangemann, F. Zimmermann, and several others.

I might just keep it.



[Update 10/23] Added sentence: So, any legal JD thesis on the vagaries and uncertainties of a particular internet aspect is a breeze.