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Retired schoolteacher gives Taiwan ruler Ma Ying-jeou a failing grade on his Harvard thesis
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A page from Ma Ying-jeou's Harvard thesis with schoolteacher's commentary
A retired schoolteacher, curious about Republic of China in-exile President Ma Ying-jeou's views on the Senkaku Islands, looked up Ma's Harvard Law School doctoral thesis about seabed boundaries. What she found was something she wasn't expecting, a paper riddled with errors, mistakes, misspellings, missing words, improper footnoting, and footnotes that did not check out.
Red pencil in hand, the former schoolteacher graded Ma's thesis, something that apparently was not done in 1980 when it was submitted for academic credit. The teacher tallied over 1000 errors or violations of the freshman student writing guide issued by the university.
When the determined teacher approached Harvard Law School, she had trouble getting anyone to talk with her. Finally, she ended up with Ma's faculty advisor who had approved the paper despite the many mistakes. Retired Professor Detlev Vagts dismissed "all of the typos" later telling the Harvard Crimson that, "Typos don't really matter that much."
However, the mistakes went beyond the frequent spacing errors and grammatical goofs and included footnotes that do not check out raising a plagiarism concern. Vagts didn't care, Ma got the basic concepts of the law.
Not to be put off, the teacher pressed Vagts about Ma's many errors and got the following written response about Ma's paper, errors included.
"The thesis was jointly supervised by the late Professor Louis Sohn and myself.Basically he took responsibility for supervision with respect to issues of the law of the sea governing the setting of maritime boundaries. I took responsibility for issues concerning the drafting and enforcing of agreements relating to the exploitation of offshore oil assets Both of us had high standards for approval of an S.J.D. thesis and both of us were fully satisfied that Ma Ying Jeou met those standards. I have now no recollection of the politics involved but I know that we would have insisted on his being as objective as possible with respect to the rather sensitive international issues that played a role in his work. One needs to remember that relations between mainland and island China were very different in 1981." [Spacing and grammar errors are those of Professor Vagts]
International politics aside, the schoolteacher remains unconvinced and unimpressed with Harvard's low standards. In January, she again queried Vagts, this time citing Harvard's own rulebook.
"From your response I assumed you did not read his final copy….don't you think he cheated on you?"
The retired schoolteacher is still waiting for her answer from Harvard University.
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