Cluj-Napoca university responds to interior minister's thesis plagiarism scandal
Babes-Bolyai University (UBB) Cluj-Napoca, one of the top-flight educational institutions in Romania, has issued a statement regarding the plagiarism scandal targeting interior minister Lucian Bode.
The minister of internal affairs is currently facing a series of allegations after Uniunea Salvați România (Save Romania Union/USR) political party brought the hot accusation that he "takes by translating entire texts from other authors and nowhere indicates what he wrote and what the mentioned ones wrote."
USR, via Cristian Ghinea, a former member of the European Parliament, further claims that the footnotes do not correlate to quoted texts and that it's far from indicated source or reference to the bibliography.
Bode graduated from Babes-Bolyai University in 2018 and defended his doctorate paper "Energy security and resource management at the beginning of the 21st century".
Daniel David, a UBB rector, told Europa Libera Romania that the university has begun verifying the information. "I am waiting to see the result of the UBB analysis, which has already started and which should probably analyze and verify this public information as well," he said.
Furthermore, the university states in a press release published by Agerpres that it's taking all the required measures, and "if, following this analysis, suspicions of a violation of academic ethics result, they will be further analyzed by the UBB Ethics Commission, following internal and national procedures."
"However, we mention that, until this date, UBB has not received any notification of suspected violation of academic ethics regarding the discussed thesis, the approach being an internal one, resulting from self-reports based on information appearing in the public space."
This scandal is not the first that occurred in Romania's academic society. Earlier this year, Sorin Cimpeanu, the minister of education, resigned from his position following plagiarism accusations of 13 chapters in his 2006 paper.
"I took over the mandate of the minister not because I had nothing to do or to add the ministry to my CV. I had both. I came at an extremely difficult time with the desire to change things for the better," he writes on his Facebook page following his departure.
(Photo source: Lucian Bode's Facebook page)
