Sandra Borch, the Norwegian minister of research and higher education, resigned from her post on January 23 after allegations that she plagiarized at least 20% of her master’s thesis on the country’s petroleum legislation, defended 10 years ago at the Arctic University of Norway. “I made a terrible mistake. I used texts from other dissertations without providing any citations. I am sorry,” said Borch, 35, who had been in the role for just five months, having previously spent two years as minister of agriculture and food.
The minister’s situation was particularly untenable given she was leading a crackdown on academic misconduct at Norwegian universities, with a ruthless focus on students accused of plagiarism. She recently appealed to the country’s Supreme Court to punish a student who reused her own text without citation—known as self-plagiarism—after she was exonerated by a lower court.
The complaint against Borch was filed by Kristoffer Rytterager, a 27-year-old business student from Oslo, who posted the results of a similarity check of the minister’s dissertation on X, formerly Twitter. “Students were being expelled for self-plagiarism, so I thought it was a good idea to check the minister’s own work,” Rytterager told the Associated Press. He identified uncited sections from six different authors, two of which came from other master’s dissertations. Even spelling errors made in the original texts remained unchanged by the minister.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said Borch’s actions were “not compatible with the trust that is necessary to be minister of research and higher education.” However, another member of Støre’s administration, Health Minister Ingvild Kjerkol, was allowed to remain in office despite also being accused of plagiarism in her master’s dissertation. The prime minister claimed that it was up to universities, not politicians, to judge academic misconduct. Even so, he instructed other ministers to check for evidence of plagiarism in their previous academic work in an effort to anticipate any scrutiny from journalists, students, and opposition politicians. Borch’s replacement, Oddmund Løkensgard Hoel, who has a degree in Nordic languages and literature and a PhD in history, assured public television network NRK that his work is free from plagiarism. “I have always been careful to cite and reference correctly, following academic rules,” said Hoel, who is a professor at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and editor of the academic journal Heimen.
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