After allegations of plagiarism, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität examines the dissertation of CSU General Secretary Huber. The result: Although it has major deficiencies, an intention to deceive is not to be seen. Nevertheless, Huber is now voluntarily resting his doctorate.
CSU General Secretary Martin Huber voluntarily renounces his doctorate. With this message, Huber reacted to the review of his doctoral thesis by Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU). According to a statement from the LMU, the responsible doctoral committee did not see any "proven deception", but determined "that the handling of the formalities as a scientific technique does not correspond to the scientific requirements of a dissertation". Huber's work "should not have been accepted as a dissertation at the time".
Shortly after he was elected CSU general secretary in May, Huber asked the LMU to review his work again "for reasons of transparency". The reason was allegations by the plagiarism researcher Jochen Zenthöfer, who initially spoke in the "Bild" newspaper of quotations without or with incorrect source information in the dissertation. At the time, Zenthöfer said that the standards of good scientific work had not been met in the dissertation. The errors went beyond individual citation errors.
In 2007, Huber presented a work entitled "The Influence of the CSU on the Western Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1954-1969 with regard to Relations with France and the USA". The LMU announced that Huber had specified the literature that had been taken over. However, he did not comply with the scientific conventions in dealing with research literature, according to which literal and content-related assumptions are to be distinguished.
The fact that the subject and the readership were left in the dark about the relationship between personal work and the work of other authors raised the suspicion of deception, it said. However, an intention to deceive could not be proven without a doubt, since Huber "consistently stated his templates and the supervisor of the work assessed this way of working as acceptable". According to the LMU, the prerequisites for a possible withdrawal of the doctoral degree are not met.
Huber then said: "I wrote my doctoral thesis to the best of my knowledge and belief. The assessment of the university is surprising and disappointing for me, but I accept and respect it. As a personal consequence, I will no longer use the doctorate." Huber added: "It's good that the examination is now complete, my full concentration is still on my work as CSU general secretary."
