Comment by contubernio
13 hours ago
The very few cases that result in sanctions are generally horrendously flagrant.
With another professor I caught a flagrant case in a student thesis and we faced attacks from the university administration because the student had a stellar transcript (also not the positive signal some might think). Punishment was almost inexistent.
It's difficult for me to imagine what it would take to get a doctoral thesis revoked.
> It's difficult for me to imagine what it would take to get a doctoral thesis revoked.
Personal grudges. Academia is full of them.
>It's difficult for me to imagine what it would take to get a doctoral thesis revoked.
No respect for the plagiarist physicist, but an easy way to control what media representatives of scientific disciplines get to say publically, is to start out with what amounts to "academic compromat" (scientific fraud, plagiarism, ...).
Did this physicist / media star recently say something controversial?
I mean why did the system let him pass as a physicist, and why did it let him rise the media rank?
Different leadership.
If some in your experience erred on the side of leniency, then it stands to reason that others might err just as egregiously in the opposite direction.
In fact, your anecdote suggests erring is the norm. We should thus expect punishments to be inappropriate in one direction or another. An appropriate punishment seems rather unlikely.
I too enjoy creating bell curves from a single datum.
No, that doesn't stand to reason at all.