Chinese Thesis Ghostwriting Scandal Reveals Huge Gray Market.
22nd September 2018
This points up a couple of elephants in the room that (so far) the European-model academic world has been ignoring:
- Other cultures don’t buy into the myth that ‘intellectual property’ is actually a thing rather than a slickly-presented government-granted monopoly.
- Other cultures also don’t see the point of the 18th-century German ‘research university’ model that requires somebody wanting a doctorate (which, as the world itself suggests, is merely a teaching qualification) to make some sort of ‘original contribution’ to the field — which is why so many doctoral dissertations are, however original, so narrowly focused as to be worthless, when they aren’t sophisticated attempts to game the system.
Anyone who’s been in graduate study with Asian students knows that they think nothing of engaging in what Europeans would consider blatant cheating and plagiarism. Their values are not our values, and probably look pretty silly to them.