Source: BBC News [UK State Media]
“A French academic is under investigation for inventing a Nobel-style prize for philology in order that he could then go on to win it. Florent Montaclair, from Besançon in eastern France, was decorated with the Gold Medal of Philology in 2016 at a ceremony held at the National Assembly in Paris, attended by ministers and Nobel laureates. But the prize was a fiction, as was the body that supposedly awarded it, the International Society of Philology – both apparently dreamed up by Montaclair to burnish his academic credentials. Philology is the study of language through texts. Investigators in Besançon are now looking into the affair to see if any laws were broken, while the university where Montaclair taught for 20 years has suspended him indefinitely.” (05/06/26)