October 14, 2022, originally published in 2019 by The Conversation.
Consortium Scholar Ararat Osipian’s 2019 article, “Putin’s plagiarism, fake Ukrainian degrees and other tales of world leaders accused of academic fraud”, originally published in English, was recently translated into Indonesian and republished on the The Conversation’s website. With the G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia coming up in November, the translation may be timely.
“[A]cademic fraud is nothing new–and it wasn’t invented in the United States,” Osipian writes. “In certain countries, my research on academic corruption attests, some public officials have built their entire political careers on the false pretense of scholastic achievement.”
Osipian goes on to detail the corruption surrounding higher education and the lengths some top politicians go to take advantage of it, from plagiarizing large sections of doctoral theses to employing “ghost writers” or brazenly buying dissertations. The denial surrounding these charges of academic fraud speaks to a larger political tactic of strong-arming and corruption, Osipian argues.
The full text, in English and Indonesian, is available here.
Osipian is a Founding Fellow at the New University in Exile Consortium.