German Professors Leave Professional Organization

Tagesspiegel reporter Hermann Horstkotte reports that a law professor from the Humboldt University in Berlin, Hans-Peter Schwintowski, has announced that he is leaving the German professional organization of university professors, the Deutscher Hochschulverband.

The reason is that the DHV is considering forcing him out, because his university found that his book Juristischen Methodenlehre did not properly quote the sources used.The DHV feels that this is incompatible with their professional honor code. Schwintowski insists that this was just an oversight that has probably happened to every member of the organization.

Another law professor, Axel Wirth, an expert on building law from the TU Darmstadt, has also announced that he will leave the organization as it is also considering forcing him out because of a commentary that he published under his own name that one of his assistants had secretly plagiarized from another source. Wirth complains that with the organization acting in this way, they are not giving the professors in question their constitutional right of re-socialization after having been found guilty of an offence.