Sadly, a second German minister with a PhD has been discovered to have plagiarized her dissertation. It is an odd thing about English that this somehow implies that the prior minister was also a woman; that is not the case.
Allow me to say that I am not speaking about dissertation quality. I doubt anyone will read my dissertation. It has some nice parts, and I'm proud of much of it, but it was not of fundamental importance. I have put my lab research on hiatus, so even for me it is gathering dust.
However, the PhD dissertation must be novel research. More than any other academic work, the dissertation can not be plagiarized, since its very purpose is to explain a novel contribution to the discipline.
Arguing this point is not the purpose of this post. I want to talk about two issues surrounding detection: who is currently doing it (and why), and how it should be done.
It seems that both of the Germans were outed by anonymous people who published lists of the stolen material. Since both held important government positions, I have to assume that the outers were motivated by politics. I normally don't support this kind of witch hunt, but I feel equally that I don't feel sorry for these people having been caught at a game many probably play.
We need a mechanism to audit dissertations, which requires a tools and a surrounding process. The tool part is easy: http://turnitin.com/ should be able to catch some, and more depending on integration with Google Books (yes, an academic mentioning Google Books without pillorying it). The process is trickier. This will miss indirect plagiarism (copying ideas or paraphrasing text without citing), but that cannot be automated at this point with existing technology.
Who should do the checking? Well, it can't be the student, since the untrustworthy ones aren't, well, trustworthy. One possibility is the Graduate School; at most US institutions, the Graduate School is an entity independent of other subunits, and they receive and certify the dissertation. However, they do this at the end of the process, usually after the final version has been approved by the student's committee and advisor.
My preference is that this be done by the chair of the student's dissertation committee, who can be the student's advisor, but need not be. It's a minor burden; even a professor with a large research group might do two or three a year. Most faculty do not average one dissertation per year.
The next question is: what do you do when you've discovered plagiarism? There are two choices, and they may not be what you expect, because they are meta-process choices. The first would be to have a policy, at the institution, college/school, or departmental level. The second would be to allow the chair to handle the situation.
If there is a policy, it will inevitably involve a new committee, lots of rules, and high penalties for the caught student. Most likely would be expulsion. I don't know if that's a good idea; it's a permanent black mark. Students working on dissertations are in a real bind; they're under extreme pressure to produce and do so more quickly than they ever have. I can't defend them, but I can see, having been through it, why someone could get tempted. The extraordinary pressure leads to many poor decisions: the number of divorces that happen during one spouse's dissertation process is high.
Personally, my hope would be that an awareness of this looming process would encourage all dissertators to not commit at least direct plagiarism. I think that if I had a students who did plagiarize, and I caught them, I would be tempted to throw them out.
A final note that plagiarism and theft are not new to academia. C. P. Snow (of "Two Cultures" fame) wrote an excellent (fiction) book about this The Affair.
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