South Korean President Lee Jae-myung withdrew the nomination of 65-year-old architecture professor Lee Jin-sook as the country’s education minister. The decision came 21 days after her name was submitted to parliament. Lee Jin-sook, the first woman to lead a major higher education institution in the country—she served as president of Chungnam National University in Daejeon from 2020 to 2024—faced mounting political backlash after being accused of plagiarism in her academic work and appropriating research from students she supervised. In her defense, she argued that plagiarism-detection software found less than 10% similarity between her papers and other texts, insisting she had not copied her PhD students’ work but coauthored papers with them as their advisor, contributing to their theses.
Cases of plagiarism impacting politics are nothing new in South Korea. Two months ago, after an investigation found evidence of extensive plagiarism, Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul revoked the 1999 master’s degree in art education of former first lady Kim Keon-hee, married to former president Yoon Suk-yeol, who was impeached in late 2024. In July, she was stripped of her PhD in design from Kookmin University, Seoul, for which she defended her thesis in 2008, because her rescinded master’s degree was a prerequisite for the program.
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