Although she did not complete her degree from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, [Melania Trump] still obtained most of her education in the immediate aftermath of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. The post-communist educational system at that time was a place where the line between original work and plagiarism was often hard to discern and the issue of intellectual ownership was never discussed.

Scholars who study plagiarism associate it with the dominant mode of learning. Learning via rote memorization, rather than the critical questioning of ideas, is more likely to lead people to appropriate others’ intellectual work. If memorization is how academic performance is judged, students will do better when they merely replicate what they have learned.

Memorization was an important component of education in post-communist Europe. This was a legacy of communism, when the dominant subjects — Marxist Ideology, The Foundations of Leninism, The Fundamentals of Socialist Economics, and so on — could not be criticized in a classroom setting without raising the suspicions of the authoritarian secret police.