[1] That same year Dickhuth succeeded Keul as president of the German Society for Sports Medicine ("Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sportmedizin und Prävention" / DGSP), a position he retained till 2006.
After receiving a report on "Doping allegations in respect of doctors in the Sports Medicine Department" ("Dopingvorwürfen gegenüber Ärzten der Abteilung Sportmedizin")[6] the University Clinic eventually withdrew from providing this form of care for athletes.
[7] It was, indeed, stated that following Dickhuth's appointment to the top job a number of organisational measures had been taken "to bring greater transparency to the individual working groups, patient reporting systems and drugs procurement processes, along with access to examination rooms and the outpatient clinics".
[8] On 25 February 2011 the university authorities received information from Letizia Paoli, chair of the "Sports Medicine Evaluation Commission", that while conducting investigations into the "Freiburg doping scandal", they had come across doubts concerning the academic integrity ("Wissenschaftlichkeit") of several pieces of work.
[9] As the result of information passed anonymously to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung[10] the press became aware that questions had arisen concerning the dissertation with which Dickhuth had earned his habilitation (qualification) back in 1983.
Reports appeared in the media indicating that the university rectorate had at this point already spent more than half a million Euros on consulting external lawyers.
Dickhuth therefore withdrew the application and received, in return, the opportunity to continue with his academic work at the faculty for a further year on an "emeritus" basis.
[18] On 28 May 2014 a radio report indicated that other habilitation dissertations successfully submitted at Freiburg University also included extensive textual congruences with doctoral works by others.
He had urged that recognition for Dickhuth's habilitation be rescinded in order to avoid giving out the impression that academic misconduct was not viewed with sufficient seriousness at Freiburg.
According to Gerhard Dannemann, an authority on the relevant legal background, the case can be persuasively made that it was, in fact, the doctoral students who were the plagiarists.
In other known cases involving habilitation dissertations by top academics in the Medical Faculty, the university management had stayed silent, neither passing the scripts to the relevant investigatory commission, nor even informing the physicians implicated.
[23] The report also included the charge against the relevant sub-committee of the habilitation committee that its work had been "slapdash and error-ridden" ("schlampig und fehlerhaft").