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Norway's health minister resigned Friday, the second Norwegian government member to step down this year amid allegations they plagiarized academic works
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- Title
- Norway's health minister resigns after plagiarism accusation in latest scandal to rock the Cabinet
- Published
- Apr 12 2024
- Word count
- 322 words
Norway's politicians have historically enjoyed a high degree of trust from the general public. They've really screwed things up for themselves these past few years with scandals across the political spectrum. Disliking politicians you disagree with was always commonplace, but contempt for politicians in general -- even the ones whose policies you support -- has been a niche position. Not so much anymore.
The context for this latest scandal is that the government has been enforcing a very strict line on what they consider to be academic cheating. They're taking a student to the Supreme Court for a much less severe case of self-plagiarism after losing in a lower court. A lot of people found this case to be unreasonably strict, including many employees at universities who signed a petition in support of the student. That led a few private citizens to begin digging into ministers' and MPs own theses to look for cases of plagiarism. And it turned out that the Minister for Higher Education, the head of the department enforcing this strict line, had committed much more serious plagiarism than the case they're taking to the Supreme Court. That minister, Sandra Borch, stepped down. Kjerkol, the health minister, has been dragging this case on for months, continually denying any wrongdoing and lying through her teeth.
Just to add a cherry on top, she chose to engage a lawyer, Marianne Klausen. Klausen was previously the head of the appeals committee for academic suspensions. It turned out that she had been appointed to this position illegally, as there was a term limit on the position which she had already passed. As head of that comittee, she had been enforcing that same strict line which would have 100% convicted Kjerkol, who is now her client. Klausen has tried to argue that the inquiry into the case was illegal as the case was too old (it happened in 2021!), while her client has argued that she could not admit any wrongdoing until an inquiry, which she has been actively trying to sabotage, has concluded.
In the past few years we've had falsified travel bills, rampant abuse of a system of free housing for commuting MPs, members of parties on both sides of the political spectrum trading, or their spouses trading stock in companies whose stock prices were affected by their own political decisions. Somehow in all this the political scandal with the biggest fallout was a party leader being caught stealing a pair of sunglasses at an airport (he later admitted to having a psychiatric problem after being caught again, stealing groceries).
Compared to most countries in the world, Norway has a very robust democracy that is in no immediate danger of falling apart at the seams. But politicians are doing their damnedest to make sure citizens never trust them again the way they (we) have largely trusted the integrity of the political establishment since the end of WWII.
It's my opinion, and that of a person I know who's sat on a Norwegian university's committee for dealing with student cheating/plagiarism, that Norwegian universities have just caught up to the standards English-language universities have used since the turn of the millennium.
In the case against the health minister who resigned today, The poor, rudimentary plagiarism check run before accepting her master's degree, showed 19% copied material from elsewhere. That figure, 19%, led the university to not bother checking whether there was cheating, because it was "below 20%". That was the only reason given.
Nord University has been a joke. The community colleges that were merged and given university status as a combined university with decentralized campuses throughout a huge region clearly weren't up to basic standards of well, running a university.
The Norwegian academics speaking out about "harsh" treatment of plagiarism with students have been ridiculed by the scientists who publish in renowned journals, who've had their education at top universities (abroad, there are none in Norway), and scientists in highly competitive fields, like engineering, different types of health sciences and Law.
This last bit is the reason why it's been so obvious that the health minister had to get removed (she didn't have the decency to resign like the minister for higher education did). Kjerkol lost the trust of the doctors, nurses, researchers and health care workers because she clearly doesn't understand how higher education works and subsequently the policies needed to be the top politician in that field.
The rest of your comment is very on point.
As things stand now, with the current prime minister having to remove 7 ministers in a cabinet of around 20 during in three years is, well, unheard of.
Like which highly qualified person within the health field would want to take over the health portfolio in government? They have to have some very clear personal convictions to want to put themselves through it. Especially as there's a huge lack of people willing to work in health care compared to the huge demand that's going to increase with the aging population the next couple of years. The coalition government seem unwilling to prioritize the field in planning budgets. You'll essentially be a fall guy.
We'll see!
Checking for plagiarism has recently been selective and used for political ends, but with new tools, perhaps it will become systematic? Here’s an editorial from the Harvard Crimson advocating for that:
Plagiarism Is the Right’s Newest Weapon. Harvard Must Disarm It.
Combined with widespread cheating by people who probably don’t plan on being a politician someday, I wonder where this goes.
I don't know about Harvard, but it's already systematic in many universities across the world, including in Norway. This is more a case of those systems failing. Of course the commonly used tools are fairly dumb, generally spitting out a percentage of text that is identical to other texts in a database. But a number like 15% "textual similarity" may be perfectly fine in certain fields if properly cited, and the current tools don't understand the difference between lazy copy paste and a properly cited quotation. This is probably a case of laziness, because the digital plagiarism control software needs human oversight to be effective.
I remember when I was in high school 15 years ago, I was "caught" plagiarizing by software. I didn't plagiarize jack shit. What happened was I uploaded some homework to the school's digital portal. We were free to resubmit until the deadline passed. Before the deadline I discovered that I was supposed to copy paste the questions into the document, not just write the answers, so I reuploaded my submission with the questions included.
Then I was flagged for plagiarizing... my own withdrawn submission to the same assignment from one hour earlier. This was not communicated to the teacher. They only saw "100% textual similarity" and accused me of cheating. It was a very unpleasant experience, as I've never plagiarized anything in my life.
That was in a high school 15 years ago. These tools have been around for a while. But as I mentioned, they're not perfect and require human oversight. In one of the cases in the article, Sandra Borch's, her thesis was submitted ten years ago, and she had plagiarized works published at a different university, so those texts weren't in her university's database. In the case of Kjerkol, it appears to be a complete human failure, as the automatic software would have flagged a high degree of textual similarity, but the number was not so worryingly high that it couldn't be legitimate. It just appears nobody actually did the work of following up on it, perhaps reasoning that in her particular field (management of health enterprises) it's common to cite many different documents verbatim (there's a lot of bureaucracy involved), so they didn't look into it.
(Update: Norwegian media now reporting that the degree of textual similarity with other texts in Kjerkol's thesis was a whopping 43%, in more than 450 separate sections of text. The original figure for the plagiarism control in 2021 when the thesis was submitted for approval was 19% Many of the additional cases were citing a primary source, but copying the text from a secondary source that was also citing the primary source, without citing the secondary source from which the text was copied.)