A Norwegian research and higher education minister resigned last week after being engulfed in a plagiarism scandal over her thesis from a decade ago, according to reports.
The specter of academic plagiarism — a hot topic in the U.S. — has now reached the heart of Norwegian politics, toppling one government minister and leaving a second fighting for her political career. Sandra Borch, Norway’s minister for research and higher education, resigned last week after a business student in Oslo discovered that tracts of Borch's master's thesis, including spelling mistakes, were copied without attribution from a different author. The student, 27-year-old Kristoffer Rytterager, got upset about Borch’s zealous approach to punishing academic infractions: After several students fought cases of “self-plagiarism” — where they lifted whole sections from their own previous work— and were acquitted in lower courts, the minister for higher education took them to the Supreme Court of Norway.