A plagiarism scandal rocks Norway's government
ABC News
The specter of academic plagiarism — a hot topic in the U.S. — has now reached the heart of Norwegian politics
STAVANGER, Norway -- The specter of academic plagiarism — a hot topic in the U.S. — has now reached the heart of Norwegian politics, toppling one government minister and leaving a second fighting for her political career.
Sandra Borch, Norway’s minister for research and higher education, resigned last week after a business student in Oslo discovered that tracts of Borch's master's thesis, including spelling mistakes, were copied without attribution from a different author.
The student, 27-year-old Kristoffer Rytterager, got upset about Borch’s zealous approach to punishing academic infractions: After several students fought cases of “self-plagiarism” — where they lifted whole sections from their own previous work— and were acquitted in lower courts, the minister for higher education took them to the Supreme Court of Norway.
“Students were being expelled for self-plagiarism. I got angry and I thought it was a good idea to check the minister’s own work,” Rytterager told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Rytterager, who studies at the BI Business School in Oslo, said he found several tracts that were suspiciously well written, and discovered they were not her own words. On Friday, the media followed up Rytterager’s posts on X, formerly Twitter, and published his discoveries. Borch resigned the same day.
