Taiwan ruler Ma Ying-jeou passed Harvard Law School despite thesis with 1000+ errors
March 5, 2009
Ma Ying-jeou Prince Roy photo
Republic of China in-exile President Ma Ying-jeou's official biography declares, "Ma received a Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) from HarvardLaw School in 1981, specializing in law of the sea and international economic law."
Ma's doctoral thesis was titled,Trouble Over Oily Waters: Legal Problems of Seabed Boundaries and Foreign Investments in the East China Sea. The paper was good enough to get him a law degree from America's richest university but does not speak well of scholarship standards at Harvard Law School.
Ma's thesis is filled with errors, mistakes, misspellings, misattribution, missing words and grammatical problems. The thesis contains over 1,000 errors that violate Harvard's writing guidebook for incoming freshmen students
A retired schoolteacher looked up Ma's thesis because she was interested in his views on the Senkaku Islands. The former teacher was shocked by the sloppy scholarship and got out her red pencil. She spent a year studying the thesis, checking out all the footnotes.
The teacher has not yet found plagiarism but with misattributed material and footnotes that do not check out she is suspicious and continues digging into the academic paper.
Like any good teacher, the tireless researcher took her concerns to Harvard where she was directed to Ma's faculty advisor, Detlev Vagts. Professor Vagts is retired and conveniently didn't keep a copy of the thesis he approved.
In 2008, Vagts told the Harvard Crimson about Ma's thesis, "I thought it was very good, very solid and very sensible both legally and politically." Vagts told the Crimson he had been approached by a reporter in Taiwan about "all the typos" but apparently confused the retired teacher with being a reporter.
Vagts said, "Typos really don't matter that much when you are picking a president." However, Ma was not being picked as a president when he submitted his error-filled thesis for academic credit in 1980.
The English-as-second-language excuse does not cover the thesis mistakes, especially since Ma served as translator for Chiang Ching-kuo during his rule of Taiwan. Many of the errors are stylistic and simply betray sloppy work.
The school teacher asked Vagts to directly comment on Ma's errors. The professor responded in writing betraying his own lack of care with typos. "Although I would like to be helpful with Ma Ying Jeou's thesis m ability to do so is limited.It was not then the rule that we kept a copy of doctoral theses for our library and I do not have one in my possession."
Vagts assured the teacher he had "high standards for approval" and he was "fully satisfied that Ma Ying Jeou met those standards."
