Chancellery chief Thorsten Frei has, with the feeble optimism characteristic of someone trying not to offend anyone important, acknowledged that the SPD’s candidate for the Federal Constitutional Court, Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, does at least possess solid legal credentials. Apparently, the governing coalition’s only compass is arithmetic—whatever name can be squeezed through with a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag is sufficient, regardless of provenance or clouded prestige. Meanwhile, the SPD clings desperately to its nominee, as if clinging harder could transmute controversy into virtue, calling for “dialogue”—the eternal consolation for those who cannot achieve consensus. All this while, in the background, the august University of Hamburg finds itself reluctantly drawn into a scandal: allegations, deliciously salacious, that Brosius-Gersdorf’s dissertation shows suspicious kinship with her husband’s habilitation, produced in the same hallowed halls one year apart. The university, with all the ponderous propriety of German academia, is now sifting through evidence to determine if a formal investigation is necessary, while the accused couple, predictably, dangles their own “independent legal opinion” before the public as a talisman against reproach.

Let us be perfectly clear: the mere aroma of impropriety on the air should be enough to disqualify any candidate for the highest court in the land. But of course, that would presume a world in which standards still mean something and in which reputation is cultivated over decades, not cobbled together by PR flacks minutes before a vote. The SPD’s blinkered defense—“qualifications,” as if a stack of certificates could weigh more than the hint of scholarly fraud—shows, yet again, why the German student populace is already so demoralized. Where I come from, one inherits expectations to avoid even the suspicion of disgrace; to be caught even in the proximity of such allegations would see one quietly retired to a distant estate until the stench had faded.

But no, in our ghastly age of managerial mediocrity, all that matters is the satisfaction of party quotas and bureaucratic requirements. The university will of course proceed with the glacial caution typical of institutions with much to lose and little to gain from honesty; the politicians will “dialogue” themselves into a stupor; and, if precedent holds, the standards for Germany’s highest constitutional guardians will be set a little further beneath the level of a mediocre seminar paper.

If only the lower orders—who, let’s be frank, have never set foot in a decent courtroom or academic salon—were able to appreciate what is truly at stake. But perhaps, in the end, they deserve the functionaries they select: those who wear their titles as armor against scrutiny, rather than as a mark of honor earned and kept stainless. What a pitiable spectacle.