Serbian University Denies Interior Minister 'Plagiarism'

Mica Jovanovic, the rector of Megatrend University, said on Monday that the thesis was genuine and that he would sue the three authors of the article minister’s published on the prominent website Pescanik.net.

“We will sue all three, and we will form a commission that will defend the university and Nebojsa Stefanovic,” Jovanovic said.

Three British-based academics wrote the article that was published on Sunday by Pescanik.net, which was entitled: “How to get a PhD? Easy! The case of Nebojsa Stefanovic.”

They alleged that the Serbian interior minister had plagiarized parts of his thesis on strategic management in local governance.

The three authors, Ugljesa Grusic, Branislav Radeljic and Slobodan Tomic, told Balkan Insight that they had read the whole thesis in detail several times and that they stood behind every claim in their article.

“We have found examples where parts of someone else’s work were taken over without citing sources and recognizing someone else’s authorship,” they said in a collective statement, adding that such actions represent a serious violation of academic rules.

But Jovanovic, who was also Stefanovic’s mentor, said that the thesis was authentic and the minister had brilliantly defended it.

“I have the impression and I am sure that my impression is right that they [the three authors] did not have the whole paper, that they used only sections, because the empirical work can not be plagiarised,” Jovanovic said.

One of the doctoral thesis committee members, Snezana Djordjevic, a professor from Belgrade University’s Faculty of Political Sciences, also denied that the thesis was plagiarized.

“It is a completely independent scientific paper and it fits the...