The age of humble restraint is clearly over.

Instead, a competition between prettied up résumés and biographical debauchery seems to have broken out.

This applies to various areas of society, both in science and in politics.

At the latest since the Excellence Initiative and its application requirements, bragging has become socially acceptable in a system in which self-doubt and self-criticism are part of the principle of knowledge.

For politicians, the academic status symbols such as a doctoral degree are attractive even if they are otherwise anxious to prove their closeness to the people.

This applies, for example, to the resigned Family Minister Franziska Giffey.

The doctorate helped her in an early phase of life to gild her technical college degree and to create a social mark of distinction.

In the office of family minister, she believed she was no longer dependent on such academic trinkets and thought it appropriate to simply throw it away in the course of the plagiarism affair.

And of all people who used to point fingers at the authors of messed up dissertations with “summa” or “magna cum laude”, Giffey attested to their electoral maneuver as particularly credible.

Raised the bar for an independent achievement

But the credibility suffers massively. On the one hand, it is about the credibility of a scientific system that does not always recognize academically inadequate doctoral theses and has long since broken the high bar for independent scientific performance. The high number of tens of thousands of doctoral students a year alone shows that it has long been a matter of quantity instead of quality.

Scientific fraud mocks those who have invested years of their lives in an honest and independent dissertation and sometimes even made history of science.

The fact that plagiarism has recently also been trivialized in the Chancellery shows how much the standards have slipped.

This is very surprising for a Chancellor with a real understanding of science.

But she had already pointed out to zu Guttenberg that she had not employed a scientific assistant in the cabinet.

It should have contributed to Merkel's personal successes as a politician that she was never prone to imposture and more appearances than real.

Well-done CVs with plenty of self-promotion

The Giffey case must not remain without consequences for the universities themselves. In the future, doctoral supervisors will have to have the courage to reject doctoral students who have had the reasonable impression that it is only about prestige, not about genuine scientific interest. They have struggled with this for years. It is not always clear at the beginning of a doctoral thesis whether something meaningful will develop from it or not; there are surprises in both directions.

On the other hand, it is about the credibility of a society with blown up job advertisements, which almost provoke souped-up résumés with plenty of self-promotion.

Why did Giffey show an internship as an occupation early on in a résumé because it was more attractive?

Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had also indicated internships in his vita as stations in Frankfurt and New York.

Why did Annalena Baerbock think, in addition to the other embarrassing negligence, with her resume after a master's as the only legal degree she had to talk about that she came from international law?

HR professionals sort out such résumés

These are exaggerations bordering on fake news. The temptation is great to add and polish here and there. But with applications, the little lies take revenge immediately. HR managers sort out such fudged CVs, 71 percent report such decisions. The social networks make it easy for them to expose the half-truths. Sometimes not even the data in the résumés with the attached job references do not match.

To seem to want more than you are is simply one of the narcissistic varieties of individualism. Because power is associated with an increase in self-esteem and enormous narcissistic gratifications, especially for people who are shaped like this, the public reacts particularly sensitively to foddered CVs and plagiarized doctoral theses by politicians. Because she rightly fears that the power of a political office could primarily serve the self-exaltation and not the general public.

Because credibility is at stake both in the academic system and in the political system, neither dishonest dissertations nor foddered résumés are trivial. Anyone who falsifies their résumé in the private sector risks being dismissed without notice. In politics and in science, he is robbing himself of the most precious good of all: trust.