335 university professors and researchers have signed a petition asking the University of Belgrade’s Rectorate not awarded the Doctor of Science title to the current Belgrade Mayor, Sinisa Mali.
The petition was sent to the Dean himself, Vladimir Bumbasirevic, who is expected to respond urgently because the case of the disputed doctor of science, Sinisa Mali has been going on for three and a half years now.
The signatories also request that the University Professional Ethics Board launches proceedings against Mali’s mentor, Ondrej Jaska and the members of the commission before whom he defended the doctoral dissertation, namely professors Sladjana Barjaktarevic and Dragan Djuricina.
„Three and a half years ago, our colleague Rasa Karapandza discovered that most of Sinisa Mali’s doctoral thesis had been plagiarized. And the saga has been going on for three and a half years now … A group of people, consisting of more than 335 professors, including eight academics and around 150 full-time professors, thinks that they have waited long enough for something to be done“, says one of the petition’s initiators, Dusan Teodorovic.
Back in 2014, Rasa Karapandza had this to say about Mali’s doctoral dissertation: „I have been reading student papers for about ten years. It’s my job. In my career, I have never encountered as much copying as I did in Mr. Mali’s doctoral thesis. The amount of non-original text is best illustrated by the graph below, where you can see the percentage of non-original text per page of the doctoral thesis. By clicking on any point in the graph, you can get a report from the program iThenticate (for plagiarism detection), namely one report for each individual page of the doctoral thesis, where Mr. Mali’s non-original text and the actual source of this text, where identical, are highlighted. A certain percentage of almost every page of the doctoral thesis is comprised of non-original text, while on more than one third of pages, Mr. Mali has plagiarized 33 percent of the text or more! With that much plagiarism, the doctoral thesis can hardly be called the property of Sinisa Mali, since he didn’t write most of it. Mr. Sinisa Mali is a major plagiarist”.
Dusan Teodorovic adds: „I refuse to participate in bureaucratic procedures that have no ending and no intention of resolving this case. People who are responsible for this are waiting for their term to expire, so that somebody else can deal with it it. This is about the lack of courage on the part of the University of Belgrade“.
Teodorovic goes on to say that he does not want this topic to be politicized and that there are a number of number of false doctors of science in private and state universities in Serbia. He also announces that a group of professors and researchers will continue to deal with all disputed doctoral thessis, including the ones written by the president of the Novi Beograd municipality, Aleksandar Sapic, the Governor of the National Bank of Serbia, Jorgovanka Tabakovic and the Interior Minister, Nebojsa Stefanovic.
(Danas, Pescanik, 27.02.2018)
https://www.danas.rs/drustvo/bumbasirevic-da-reaguje-na-slucaj-sinise-malog/
https://pescanik.net/belgrade-mayor-sinisa-little-mali-is-a-big-time-plagiarist/
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