Darmstadt: Sociologist Cornelia Koppetsch is threatened with losing her teaching license – suspected plagiarism

Until a few years ago, anyone who wanted to understand why the right was so popular again asked Cornelia Koppetsch. With “The Society of Anger,” the sociologist published a highly acclaimed study in 2019 in which she explained the turn of many milieus toward populism and authoritarian figures as the result of a “cultural conflict” between the disappearing “industrial modernity” and a new, globally influenced modernity.

But soon after the book was published and celebrated everywhere, what became apparent were the many passages that Koppetsch had more or less obviously taken from other works. Several investigations have since confirmed that Koppetsch had regularly plagiarized many of her works.

The TU Darmstadt has released her from her teaching and research activities “until further notice”.

Now the once respected scientist is facing the most serious blow to date: the faculty council of the Faculty of Cultural Studies at Leuphana University in Lüneburg has withdrawn Koppetsch’s habilitation. In her habilitation thesis “The Ethos of Creatives” from 2006, she was guilty of “serious violations of academic honesty”. As later in “The Society of Wrath,” she adopted passages from the works of other authors. Leuphana’s press release speaks of a “pattern of improper separation between one’s own and others’ formulations and thoughts”.

The Technical University of Darmstadt, in turn, where Koppetsch has been a professor of “gender relations, education and lifestyle” since 2009, has already drawn conclusions from the decision: Since the habilitation was the essential qualification for Koppetsch’s appointment, they are checking whether the habilitation has been withdrawn “the requirements for withdrawal of the professorship at TU Darmstadt are met”. Koppetsch has been “released from her teaching and research activities at TU Darmstadt until further notice”. Koppetsch’s lawyer said he had already filed a lawsuit against Leuphana’s decision. He “couldn’t see any legal basis” for the TU Darmstadt’s decision.

After the first allegations against Koppetsch, the TU Darmstadt set up two investigative commissions to examine her works. The first in August 2020 attested that the “ruthless author” had a “consistently poor way of working”. After new allegations were made in 2021, this time against her collection of essays “Right-wing populism as protest”, the TU set up a second commission, which also found a number of plagiarisms. In both cases, the university imposed disciplinary measures, the details of which, however, are not publicly commented on. However, Koppetsch was allowed to keep her professorship.

Most recently, Koppetsch was in the headlines because of a completely different case. In 2023, her partner Kai Borrmann, who is an Islamic scholar and a local Berlin politician, but was also a member of the AfD until shortly before his conviction, was convicted because he racially insulted two black women in a café and bit one of them on the arm.