Another German Politician with Purchased Doctorate

Another German politician has been caught using a doctorate that he purchased. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reports on Dieter Jasper, who sits in parliament for the ruling CDU party.

It seems that in 2004 he "obtained" a doctorate from the "Freien Universität Teufen" in Switzerland. He said that he chose this university because he "needed" a doctorate in order to take over his father's company and this one had an "easy" doctoral degree regulation (Promotionsordnung). One does indeed wonder how he found them, as they don't even have the pretense of a home page. If you google them, you find an advertising page for purchasing degrees and a link to a "European Acadamy".

He says that he wrote a dissertation - an analysis of his father's company. How convinient.

When all the talk about purchased titles came up, he hired a lawyer to check the validity of his title. But he continued using it, as there were elections running in September 2009 and that title just looks so nice. He won, by a hair.

A fellow parliamentarian, Mario Czaja, also from the CDU, was also recently discovered to have a "doctorate" from the same illustrious institution. He was forced to resign from the committee on science. Theoretically, Jasper could be fined or even spend up to a year in prison.

Bizarrely, these ads for companies that will help you purchase a doctorate were decorating the page of the Süddeutsche....

Maybe the SZ needs to have a closer look at their Google AdSense keywords.

(Thanks to Wolf for the pointer!)