Plagiarization of a Dissertation on Tibetan Verbal Prefixes

Turcologist Herbert Wilhelm Duda,
who may be in some sense partly to blame

Dear reader! I recommend you read this astonishing story about more and slightly less imperfect academics first, and afterwards I’ll supply a list of the perpetrators. It is drawn from a book of memoirs, Nicholas Poppe’s Reminiscences, ed. by Henry G. Schwarz, Studies on East Asia series vol. 16, Center for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University (Bellingham 1983), pp. 230-231.

“In 1952 I received a letter from a young Austrian scholar, the Turcologist and Mongolist Udo Posch, who taught at the University of Graz. He asked me whether he could obtain a Fulbright Fellowship to work at the University of Washington. I talked this over with Professor Taylor, and arrangements were made for Posch’s coming. He arrived in the fall of 1953. From the very beginning he appeared a strange person. He often was, or pretended to be, ill and missed many classes. One could often see on the blackboard of his class the notice "No Turkish today." Finally this notice became permanent, and a note to the janitor was added which told him not to erase it. 

“Posch was irascible and unfriendly to his students. His unpublished doctoral dissertation was on Tibetan verbal prefixes, and he often showed it to his students as if wanting to say that they would never be able to produce a scholarly work like this. Once a student who was not studying under him asked him for help in translating an obscure passage in a Tibetan text. Posch flew into a rage and declared that he did not know and did not want to know “all those monkey languages,” and ordered the student out of his office. The student went to the student lounge and while he was sadly reflecting on his clash with Posch, another student entered and asked what the matter was. He related his experience with Posch and his listener said that he was utterly puzzled because Posch had always boasted about his dissertation on Tibetan verbal prefixes. The two students then decided to solve this puzzle, and one day when they found Posch’s office open and empty, they took Posch’s dissertation which lay on his desk and microfilmed it. They then went to the university library and discovered in the catalog the title of a book on Tibetan verbal prefixes by von Koerber, published in Los Angeles in 1939. After obtaining a copy of that book, the students quickly discovered that Posch’s dissertation was a verbatim translation of that book. Armed with this evidence, they marched to Professor Taylor and showed it to him. Posch was immediately fired, Vienna University was notified, and it declared Posch’s doctoral degree null and void. 

“When I asked Posch why he had done it, he answered that he had been Professor Duda’s doctoral candidate in Turkish but that he had a quarrel with him and changed over to become a graduate student of Professor Robert Bleichsteiner, the Tibetanist and Mongolist. Bleichsteiner allegedly suggested that he write his dissertation on Tibetan. I suspect that Bleichsteiner knew perfectly well that Posch’s dissertation was simply a translation of von Koerber’s book because Bleichsteiner was too good a scholar not to be acquainted with that book. Being a kind person, he obviously wanted to help Posch who was in a difficult position after his clash with Duda.

“Professor Taylor suggested to Posch that he get a valid doctoral degree, but Posch had become addicted to drugs in the meantime and died in the 1960s. Posch’s case was unique. I had never before encountered a plagiarist quite like him, and I was surprised to learn that a plagiarist could be as naive as to show his manuscript to everybody and to brag about it. At the very least, he should have destroyed the manuscript after having obtained his degree.”

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Dramatis personae

Robert Bleichsteiner (1891-1954) is memorable mainly for his book Die Gelbe Kirche, published in Vienna in 1937, translated into French as L'Eglise jaune, about the Gelugpa school. It is rarely even mentioned in recent times. I don’t think there was ever an English translation of it. His specialty was in the languages of the Caucasus, primarily Georgian.

“Duda” means Herbert W. Duda (1900-1975). There is a fairly substantial Wiki entry about him in German. Here we see that he was one of the many German academics who signed a statement welcoming Adolf Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship.

The book that was plagiarized was this one: Hans Nordiwen von Koerber (1896-1979), Morphology of the Tibetan Language: A Contribution to Comparative Indosinology, Suttonhouse (Los Angeles 1935). For a PDF, just search in Internet Archive (https://archive.org/) and download it in a format of your choice.  In this book he also announced a book in preparation: Dictionary of Tibetan Roots and Their Development. His works have seldom been found worthy of mention. The author was one of the many Germans kept prisoner in India during the war, but other than that I can find out little more about him apart from a brief sketch here. This does tell us that this book is an English rendering of his 1921 dissertation in German. There are two slight inaccuracies in the Reminiscences: [1] The English version of his dissertation was published in 1935, not 1939, and [2] Tibetan only makes use of verbal prefixes when making calques from Sanskrit (examples: rjes-su, rab-tu, rnam-par), otherwise verbal inflections are mainly done with suffixes.

One of the two UW students responsible for uncovering Posch’s plagiarism was John Krueger (1927-2018) who would later teach Mongolian Studies at Indiana University’s Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies, meanwhile moonlighting as a pimp for welfare mothers under his moniker Paul Toll (he was tried and found guilty, but let off lightly). I have a clipping of this on file: Dan Kadlec, “Professor Charged in Prostitution Ring,” The Herald-Telephone [Bloomington, Indiana], vol. 107, no. 69 (Tuesday, August 2, 1983). Other news items can be found on the internet if you look for them, like this one on his sentencing. I was in town at the time, and distinctly remember joking speculations about why he may have given himself the name “Paul Toll,” suggesting it was a ‘hidden’ version of *Tall Pole or the like. But now with a little hindsight and Schmoogling I can see how ad hoc that explanation really was. Paul Toll (1882-1946) was business partner with another wealthy Swede who finally committed suicide in Paris in 1932 named Ivar Krueger. In 1908 the two of them jointly formed a company called “Krueger & Toll.” If we were to look further, it may well be that the two Kruegers were twigs in the same family tree. A movie, The Match King, was based on the life of Ivar Krueger. It portrays him as an early modern global entrepeneuer and victim of his own Ponzi scheme. You can see a trailer here. It seems in the movie the name of Paul Toll turns into Paul Kroll which is then used as the name of Ivar Krueger, his role played by the actor Warren William, or do I have things mixed up here?

Have a look at this letter to The Crimson by Richard N. Frye.  Note that Frye, Harvard professor and former OSS member, was active in recruiting Poppe for the American academy. Given his personal role in bringing Nicholas Poppe to North American and finding him a position, we might be wary of slanted testimony. For more on how Poppe’s Americanization was one example of a broader post-war policy of recruiting ‘brains’ for the academic world while turning a half-blind eye when it came to just whose interests those brains had been working for during the war, see Martin Oppenheimer, “Social Scientists and War Criminals.” 

The dates of Udo Posch are 1922-1965. I really cannot add anything of interest about him except to say that he contributed a few entries about ethnic groups in Northwest China for the Human Relations Area Files in 1956. A list of his works was published after his death in the Central Asiatic Journal, but I can’t get access to it at the moment. (I did get access with a little help from J.S.) 

“Professor Taylor” means the Sinologist George Edward Taylor (1905-2000), another professor at the University of Washington.

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I don’t know that plagiarism of complete dissertations has been all that common in any field of study. I have the feeling that nowadays it would be much more difficult to get away with as there are a number of easy-to-use digital methods for detection. But there is one case I know of. A well-known contemporary Indologist and Tibetologist teaching in the Netherlands woke up one day to find that his dissertation on Tibetan grammar had been plagiarized by an Indian “author.” But let our good friend, Leiden professor Peter Verhagen tell you about it himself, in this Oral History of Tibetan Studies interview.