Posted on 03/28/2006 5:04:23 AM PST by Ditto
If plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, then Russian President Vladimir Putin has made two University of Pittsburgh professors blush. Researchers at the Brookings Institution, a private nonprofit corporation in Washington, D.C., recently discovered that Putin copied significant chunks of a 1978 textbook by Pitt professors William R. King and David I. Cleland and passed it off as his own for his mid-1990s economic dissertation.
"One is always pleased when one's work is found to be useful, but it's a little disappointing when one's work is found to be represented as someone else's," said King, a professor at Pitt's Katz Graduate School of Business. "It's a pretty serious breach of academics when one presents material that isn't original as their own."
About 16 pages of text and at least six diagrams and tables from Putin's 218-page dissertation -- which earned him the equivalent of a master's degree in business administration from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997 -- were taken almost word-for-word from King and Cleland's "Strategic Planning and Policy," according to Brookings researchers Clifford Gaddy and Igor Danchenko.
The book was translated into Russian in 1982.
It is unclear whether Putin actually wrote the dissertation -- it was fairly common practice in Russia to pay for such work -- but Gaddy said it is likely that the Russian president and former KGB spy thoroughly read the Pitt professor's textbook.
(Excerpt) Read more at pittsburghlive.com ...
gotcha pong
Kinda flips the story onto the golly gosh pile . . . along with any respect for advanced degrees granted by Soviet/Russian diploma mills.
What a find. So what else has Putin been taking??? Guess we might get a sneak preview in June, as he is hosting the G8 Summit and it is to be about "energy security".
as a Pitt student in the early 1980's, I always sort of suspected that prominent Russian Communists were taking their cues from my professors :)
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