Furthermore, textual analysis suggested that some of the textual extracts in question appeared to have been composed by Dickhuth himself. Also, these dissertations had been submitted only after the submission of Dickhuth's own dissertation. The various timelines meant that it was impossible that Dickhuth had himself copied the questionable passages in his dissertation text. One of the professors identified in this context was , the medical director at the University Clinic. He had urged that recognition for Dickhuth's habilitation be rescinded in order to avoid giving out the impression that academic misconduct was not viewed with sufficient seriousness at Freiburg. Reports subsequently emerged alleging that Siewert's own habilitation dissertation, submitted many years earlier, was suspiciously similar to the doctoral dissertation of his former colleague, Hans-Fred Weiser. In September 2014 the withdrawal of recognition from Dickhuth's dissertation became final. The Habilitation Committee had not accepted the legal challenge which Dickhuth had himself withdrawn on 12 September 2014. There was talk of "a deal". Disciplinary proceedings against Dickhuth were suspended on 9 September 2014. He retains the status and privileges of a retired public servant and remains entitled to use the title "Professor", having properly fulfilled his duties as a professor. In February 2016 the grounds for withdrawal of recognition for Dickhuth's dissertation were made public: Dickhuth had indeed composed the contentious section of text himself, but by making them available to six of his doctoral students he had assigned authorship rights to them, in the process excluding his own rights. Not everyone has been convinced that culpability properly rests with Dickhuth. According to , 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. A lengthy analysis of the affair appeared in the journal , and concluded that Dickhuth should not have been deprived of his academic qualification. According to this analysis, Dickhuth could be seen as a pawn, sacrificed to prop up the declining reputation of the University Clinic as a way to avoid budget cuts. In pursuit of that objective, however, the university had expended a seven-digit sum. 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. 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"").