THIS RESIGNATION POSES CHALLENGES TO UNFAITHFUL LEADERS

  
The Germany's Defence minister Karl-Theodor Guttenberg, who resigned recently over his PhD status was a popular politician. 

It was found out that about 5% of his PhD thesis on phases of the constitutional development of America and the EU (still on Amazon but sadly out of stock) had been lifted straight from other books and websites without appropriate accreditation.
 
Guttenberg was Germany's youngest-ever minister for trade when he joined Angela Merkel's cabinet in 2009, aged only 37; that his aristocratic family's fortune is estimated at €400m (£339m); that he has no fewer than 10 first names.
Since entering the world of frontbench politics, Guttenberg has hardly been out of the German news, not always for the wrong reasons. He was the first German politician to spell out in public that Germany was "at war" in Afghanistan, rather than just "engaged in a mission" – encouraging some commentators on this side of the Channel to splutter about a revival of Prussian military values. But he also took the radical step of getting rid of Germany's compulsory military service, a move that some argue may lead to the eventual abolition of the country's national army. 
In many ways the most fascinating nugget of information is not what Guttenberg did once in power, but that out of all possible sins, he would be brought down by a PhD thesis.
There has been much sniggering about the fact that German politicians get sacked for plagiarising their PhDs while Tanzanian politicians don't even get sacked for corruption allegations.
 
Many PhD students get into a position like this, where they suddenly realise that the work they had started as a sideline, perhaps as a means of supporting their research, has taken over their academic work (I know, because it happened to me). For many this is the point at which they realise they can no longer justify taking up academic resources, where it makes more sense to abandon the PhD altogether. Why couldn't Guttenberg have just done the same?