Gleichschaltung macht frei: Bonn University Fires Prof. Ulrike Guérot over Allegations of 'Plagiarism'

An Amorality Tale of Double Standards (if any), Rank Hypocrisy, and a Courageous Colleague Who Isn't Afraid to Literally Speak Truth to Power

Editorial comment: this is an unplanned posting as I’ve already posted a long entry earlier today; yet, posting it I shall, for in the morning I learned that Ulrike Guérot (Prof., Political Sciences) was fired by the University of Bonn. Guérot is among the very few German academics who consistently spoke out against the Covid madness and argued for a more nuanced approach to the Kadavergehorsam (zombie-obedience) espoused by virtually all politicians and their willing collaborators in legacy media.

Thus, I resolved to publish a German-language essay over at TKP (please find it here) and provide you with an English-language translation here. Please read and share Ulrike Guérot’s story, for it might be a harbinger of things to come.

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Gleichschaltung macht frei: Bonn University Fires Prof. Ulrike Guérot

It has happened before, and it just happened again. The University of Bonn has terminated its ‘contentious’—and upright—faculty member, Professor Ulrike Guérot, effective 31 March 2023. The reason given is ‘plagiarism’ in non-academic publications. Guérot became known to a broader public primarily through her principled stand against the Covid mandates and her ‘contrarian’ positions on the Ukraine conflict. This brought her a lot of harassment and negative treatment in legacy and social media, but Guérot did not back off. Last week, Jürgen Habermas was cancelled, this week it hit Ulrike Guérot: who’s next?

This morning, I opened my LinkedIn profile—and what I saw shocked me:

‘The University of Bonn terminated my employment effective 31 March 2023 alleging ‘plagiarism’ in a non-academic publication, even though I only became a faculty member in Bonn in Sept. 2021. I declare my intent to sue and therefore I cannot respond to any interview or other requests. I would be the first person who’s fired in the history of the Federal Republic [since 1949] because of plagiarism. We live in interesting times!

If you read German (or use machine translation), do venture over to Ulrike Guérot’s Twitter profile to get an impression of the hate and harassment she has to endure due to her stance:

Ulrike Guérot @ulrikeguerot

Die @UniBonn hat mir wegen Plagiat in einem nicht-wissenschaftl. Buch von 2016 zum 31.3. gekündigt. Ich werde dagegen juristisch vorgehen und stehe deswegen nicht für Anfragen zur Verfügung. Ich wäre die erste Person, der in D wegen „Plagiat“ gekündigt würde: es wird spannend ;-)

Of course, anyone who speaks out in public must have a thick skin. What is particularly striking about the ‘Guérot affair’, however, is that the claims made by certain individuals—at first glance—do not correspond to the truth.

The ‘Guérot Affair’: A Storm in a Teacup? Not at all.

Ulrike Guérot was appointed to the professorship for European policy at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn in 2021. Prior to the appointment, she held several positions, including at the Danube University Krems (2016-21), the universities of Frankfurt am Main and Oder, the Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, and the Paul N. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C.

Anyone who knows even a little about academic practices knows, of course, that such faculty appointments are only the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Usually, such procedures begin years before with what is called Strukturbericht (structural reports, i.e., a justification for the vacancy based on past performance), internal debates about the orientation and resources of the professorship, which typically go on between the appointment committee, the concerned department, the faculty, and the university leadership. ‘Only’ after all these things have been discussed comprehensively internally does the ‘public’—by which is meant: ‘public’ within the university (universitätsöffentlich)—part of the procedure begin with the advertisement of the vacancy.

The bottom line is that, first and foremost, faculty appointments do not fall from the sky. On the contrary, they are prepared long in advance—and if the saying ‘many cooks spoil the broth’—holds be true, then it is most likely in the consultations, which more often than they are not, are ‘unofficial’, and associated ‘further’ considerations that inevitably accompany every faculty appointment.

In short: Ulrike Guérot's appointment in 2021 was certainly accompanied by similar considerations and, this much seems certain, can by no means be described as something ‘special’ or even ‘extraordinary’.

On the contrary: the appointment committee that put Guérot at the top of its ranked appointment list in 2020/21 was very well aware of the positions their new colleague publicly advocated.

Of course, no one can foresee just how colleagues who have just been appointed will behave in the future. But it can happen that academics—even more so after successfully running the gauntlet that commonly goes by the name of ‘academic career’—finally become aware of their social responsibility in a supposedly ‘safe’ position.

‘Historia docet’: The Lessons of History

At this point, dear readers, two essays are of particular importance, both of which I can only highly recommend to you. The first of these is, of course, Noam Chomsky’s text on precisely this responsibility, which appeared under the title ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ on 23 Feb. 1967 in the New York Review of Books.

The second essay in question is Harold Rosenbaum ‘A Herd of Independent Minds’, which appeared in the US magazine Commentary as early as autumn 1948 and in which Rosenbaum criticised the stifling conformity of post-war New York scene (I can easily access this text from my device; if you find the text behind a paywall, please refer to my Substack).

Why do I bring this up?

Because most of my ‘appointed’ colleagues prefer the second path rather than the much harder path taken by Chomsky and now Guérot.

Why should you, dear reader, care about these academics and their problems?

It may seem surprising at first glance, but you can be assured of one thing: if no more objections to the arbitrary application of (state) power are emanating from the universities, your rights and freedoms will be curtailed or abolished, but then you will no longer find anyone among ‘the professoriat’ who wants to stand by you.

Notes on (Un)culture of the Academy

Many legacy media outlets have already reported on this, as Guérot herself has posted on LinkedIn and Twitter. Among them are many regional papers and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, but also the Weltwoche and Tichys Einblick, among others.

It is clear from these publicly accessible accounts that Guérot is not only being treated ‘unfairly’, but that a number of other problematic aspects are also being lumped together to make for a seemingly certain character assassination of one of Germany’s most outspoken critic.

On the one hand, there is the accusation by the University of Bonn that the alleged reason for dismissal occurred ‘during her period of serviceemployment’. On the one hand, this relates to Guérot’s 2016 book Why Europe Must Become a Republic (orig. Warum Europa eine Republik werden muss, which was obviously published around six years before Guérot took up her post.

Certainly, Ulrike Guérot's appointment was partly due to her public profile, since nowadays every professor should have a comprehensive media profile in addition to research and teaching. In the case of women, there are also additional (informal) considerations about their family life, and in the case of men, the generally tacit assumption that in case of doubt, the partner is standing by ‘at the ready’ for ‘additional assignments’. To wait for corresponding indignation about these aspects from the juste milieu seems, honestly speaking, like a Beckett drama with a known outcome…

Back to the ‘Guérot affair’, because the situation is even more abstruse: Guérot allegedly plagiarised in her essay Why Europe Must Become a Republic, which was published in 2016 under considerable time pressures. Either the appointment committee did not notice this or it was deliberately overlooked ‘for other reasons’, e.g. due to the considerably increased media visibility of the University of Bonn as a result of Guérot’s appointment. (To give you an impression of Guérot’s visibility, just search for the title of her essay and her name; she was more than a ‘household name’ EU-wide.)

This may be all well and good, but in any case it is an indication that the appointment committee either did not look very closely or deliberately accepted this. Nobody looks good here, but least of all Ulrike Guérot.

Moreover, in its justification of the dismissal, the University of Bonn also refers to a number of problems in several articles that appeared in legacy media outlets.

Every academic who publishes outside his or her own professional circles finds himself or herself confronted, literally overnight, with a multitude of objections of an editorial or other nature, which, to put it mildly, have little or nothing to do with ‘good academic practice’.

Ulrike Guérot can confirm this—as can I—without much ado: deadlines, word limits, and other ‘constraints’ (e.g. no funding or time for additional copy-editing or proper translations) are all ‘part of the game’.

The juste milieu as a Repeat Offender

So, how to describe Ulrike Guérot’s ‘original sin’? Writing for die Weltwoche, Stefan Millius offers the by far the most accurate explanation:

The accusation of plagiarism is a flimsy pretext. What is called plagiarism were minor carelessnesses, such as missing inverted commas. Nowhere did the professor systematically copy. She always listed her sources in the text.

Guérot made a completely different ‘mistake’. For a long time she was the darling of the left-liberal milieu before she first broke with them in the Corona Crisis. She criticised the measures, demanded the prosecution of those responsible, and the shuttering of the World Health Organisation (WHO).

When she then pleaded for peace instead of arms supplies in the Ukraine war and spoke of the West’s complicity, the mainstream finally has had enough. For them, she was now a Corona Denier [Corona-Leugner] and a Putin Sympathiser [Putin-Versteher].

Because the highly decorated best-selling author could not be so easily removed from scientific discourse, the alleged cases of plagiarism suddenly appeared. Anyone who investigates this is left shaking their head.

Last week Jürgen Habermas was all but cancelled it; this week, it’s Ulrike Guérot’s turn.

By the way—NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg only yesterday (!) praised Habermas’ proposal in the highest terms, as for example the Norwegian state broadcaster NRK reported on 23 Feb. 2023:

This will probably end up in negotiations. But any signal that we are not fully committed to Ukraine reduces the chances of a peaceful solution. It is only when Putin realises that he will not win on the battlefield that we can hope for a negotiated solution.

What is happening here with Ulrike Guérot is horrifying in the extreme. And we haven’t even talked about the probably most apt comparison: the warmonger Annalenea Baerbock, who is constantly taken to task by the same legacy media. Of course, I’m kidding.

Here you will find a particularly telling example of this, which appeared on German state broadcaster ZDF (!) on 30 July 2021:

Overall, it looks—as of today—that so far only very few literally copied passages in the 240-page book are copyright infringements. But the position of the Greens and Baerbock that there is no copyright infringement is likely untenable.

Lawyer Harro von Have said that ‘as a rule, one would not litigate about this’. And legal scholar Volker Riebel added thjis:

Since it is no longer only a matter of adopting fact-based formulations, but also thought-based formulations, this is more akin to ‘misleading of the reader’.

All this hardly applies to the ‘Guérot affair’. It should also be noted that Annalena Baerbock, due to her public office, has a much greater social responsibility than Ulrike Guérot.

Nor is Baerbock—along with former Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg—the only person whose obviously questionable conduct has led to far gentler treatment by mainstream media outlets.

Matthias Döpfner, for example, who as head of the Axel Springer Group, was also accused of plagiarism, again, by notorious ‘plagiarism hunter’ Stefan Weber, also comes to mind.

The latter’s offence, by the way, was far more egregious than what Ulrike Guérot is accused of, as the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported a month ago:

As the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main announced on Friday, the Commission for Dealing with Scientific Misconduct ‘found scientific misconduct due to the multiple verbatim or intellectual adoption of foreign intellectual authorship’. It went on to say: ‘However, the individual findings were not sufficient in their sum and with regard to their significance for the scientific core of the thesis to justify the removal of the doctoral degree’.

Döpfner was not ‘only’ allowed to keep his doctoral degree, but there was also no question at-all whether he should resign from his functions.

Perhaps one could add to this that different (gender) standards are being applied.

‘The Science’ Looking Bad

What remains is a decidedly stale aftertaste. The most appropriate assessment of the situation can be found—not surprisingly—in the Swiss Weltwoche. Millius again:

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) is known to have been busy writing her book Jetzt: Wie wir unser Land erneuern (‘Now: How to Renew Our Country’), and she diligently helped herself to other authors’ thoughts and words. Legacy media immediately rushed to her defence: it was not a scientific work, so there was no need for footnotes.

The same also applies to Ulrike Guérot’s book Wer schweigt, stimmt zu (‘Silence Means Consent’). It is a popular science essay, not a doctoral thesis [such as Döpfner's, I’d add]. But while the politician was cleared, the professor lost her job.

Guérot does not want to merely swallow this. But even if she should succeed in court, one observation remains: in academic circles, one is only allowed to do research if one sticks to the line set by the state.

This should, nay, must be rejected, in particular as a quite similar case occurred a few months ago involving Professor Günter Roth (reporting in German over at TKP).

Personally, I wish Ulrike Guérot all the best and high spirits for what she now faces.

The motto of all of us should be—to paraphrase the motto of the Vienna Secession:

To every age its scholarship, to every scholarship its freedom.