Assoc. PhD Vilian Krastev
Academism in our country has long been talked about in a negative tone, because of a bunch of accumulated problems in its organization: unceasing massification (who is not a student anymore?!); a deepening mercantile image (money drives the educational and scientific process); incompatibility of transmitted knowledge with practice; constantly depreciating scientific degrees and academic positions… The latter are increasingly empty prefixes (Ph.D., D.Sc., Assoc., Prof.), whose holders have neither the self-confidence nor the reason to be the superstructure of a modern and creative society in a European country.
The reason: international backwardness (there is not a single Bulgarian university among the top 1000 in the authoritative rankings of world educational ratings!) and the predominantly provincial character of science in our country go hand in hand with desperate ignorance and impudence of a significant part by the people representing the native higher education system.
One of the most widespread defects of academia, often left in the shadow of exposure, is plagiarism. In our country, it has long been criminalized, but due to the widespread lack of talent and low training among individual representatives, it is often deliberately hidden and remains undetected. The details of this problem are “buried“ in the current practice of academic growth, which creates vicious conditions for its multiplication.
Without going into details about the criteria for academic growth, I will note that it is subject to a law (ZRASRB), which provides for the holding of scientific competitions based on the principle of personal invitation. That is, those who set out to acquire scientific degrees or academic positions determine themselves who will be their evaluators, with the absence of any form of anonymity and unpredictability. Whether it will be Gencho, Pencho, Atanas and Spas does not really matter, because the selection is friendly. From then on, everything is clear – the candidate in the competition to cook the banquet and “sewing the epaulettes” for the newly acquired title.
It is alarming that many cases of plagiarism remain undetected for years, and the perpetrators of such acts lie undisturbed in universities and research institutes, and even give thought and evaluations to the achievements of others. There is an unwritten rule that if someone has been tempted to plagiarize, they probably have done it before or will do it again in the future. Plagiarism in this respect is not a simple crime, but a diseased state of mind and reflects “intellectual stupidity” of the perpetrator. It is a form of incompetence and illiteracy for the one who did it, proving that his brain cannot give birth to anything creative.
Each year, dozens of plagiarism reports are received by the Academic Ethics Committee of the Ministry of Education and Culture, most of which are confirmed by external arbitration evaluators. We are talking about thefts of intellectual work that are shocking in their scale, as well as related procedural violations by evaluators of the respective competitions. And those caught in plagiarism have scientometrics that must be searched with a magnifying glass to be fixed.
The mindless, the parasitizing or those seeking rapid academic growth are the main carriers of the plagiarism syndrome. However, where is the conscience and the sense of justice of the evaluators in scientific competitions? Some of them are specialists in marketing and branding, others are written about “names in science“… but when it comes time to show it in practice – their competences give them fireà. With the silence of such crimes, do these representatives of academicism realize where they get their salaries from and what harm they are causing to higher education and social systems in our country?
Because plagiarism, entrenched in the higher education system, reproduces its incompetence and illiteracy on the students it trains. The latter, introduced into the practice, become propagators of illiteracy, fatness, and simpletons. We see this more and more often in Bulgarian education, administration, management...