'A form of theft': Kansas university president’s dissertation raises concerns

WICHITA — Wichita State University president Richard Muma failed to give proper credit to more than 20 authors after copying their writing in his doctoral dissertation.

Muma, president of the university since 2020, runs afoul of academic standards and university policies by including extensive amounts of inadequately attributed material into his 2004 dissertation, according to academic professionals who reviewed Muma’s work.

A Kansas Reflector comparison of Muma’s 88-page dissertation with earlier scholarly work uncovered improperly ascribed phrases, sentences and paragraphs. In some cases, text copied from books and journals comprised the majority of entire pages in Muma’s dissertation.

Ten faculty at public and private colleges and universities said in interviews Muma’s dissertation amounted to plagiarism. None embraced Muma’s view that his dissertation adhered to academic publication standards.

Steven Mintz, a history professor at University of Texas-Austin who has authored or edited 15 books and found plagiarism of his own writing in international publications, said Muma’s dissertation would give the university a “black eye.”

“It is a form of theft. In my department, if I let a dissertation get to that stage, well, a student would be expelled, but I would be ostracized,” Mintz said.

WSU stands by Muma

Muma denied he plagiarized his dissertation through Wichita State spokeswoman Lainie Mazzullo-Hart, who said allegations of academic misconduct, especially assertions of plagiarism, were a serious matter.

Despite repeated requests via phone and email over five weeks, WSU declined to make Muma available for an interview.

“What I can share with you is that Dr. Muma vehemently denies any accusation of plagiarism and maintains that the research, analysis and conclusions in his dissertation were entirely original, and all referenced material were properly cited in accordance with academic standards,” Mazzullo-Hart said.

Muma’s dissertation, “ Use of Mintzberg’s Model of Managerial Roles as a Framework to Describe a Population of Academic Health Profession Administrators,” relied on parentheses — in the form of (Bennett, 1983) — to cite sources. He also included reference materials in a bibliography.

But Muma’s research paper lacked routine techniques for attributing other authors’ work. Typically, attribution is made through single or double quotation marks, italics or indentation of margins on the page.

A dissertation review

Muma was a tenured professor and department chair at the time he submitted the dissertation on physician assistant education programs to a faculty review panel at University of Missouri-St. Louis. The project earned him a doctorate in higher education. With that credential, Muma advanced through the hierarchy at WSU from department chairman to vice president, provost and president.

Misappropriated text started with the first sentence in his dissertation: It was a mirror image to the opening of the 1983 book “Managing the Academic Department” by John Bennett, who earned a doctorate at Yale University, served as a college provost and authored more than 100 articles and six books.

“Important? Definitely. Overworked? Probably. Prepared for the job? Rarely. This is the typical academic department chairperson,” Bennett wrote.

Muma copied the sequence word for word, but didn’t place quotation marks around the text to show readers the prose was created by someone else. Muma replicated that pattern dozens of times in his dissertation.

Of 255 words on the first page of Muma’s dissertation, more than 150 were copied from published work by Bennett and two other scholars, Kathleen Stassen Berger and Allan Tucker.

In a lengthy passage on Page 22, Muma deleted quote marks from borrowed text, keeping the reader in the dark that there was an original author. On Page 24 of the dissertation, three-fourths of 284 words were copied from other scholarly writing and pasted into the dissertation. All but a handful of 230 words on Page 29 were drawn verbatim from previously published academic work.

In 2002, for example, Berger wrote an academic article on “Inevitable Conflicts of a Department Chair.” Her distinctive opening lines: “Too much to do, too little time. Deadlines ignored; demands not met; requests trashed. Students, faculty, staff, and administrators queue up with phone messages, mailbox memos, emails and knocks on my door.”

Muma’s casting two years later echoed Berger: “It seems that academic department chairs have too much to do and no time to do it. Frequently they ignore deadlines, have demands that are not met, and requests are not answered.” That was followed by verbatim text: “Students, faculty, staff, and administrators queue up with phone messages, mailbox memos, emails, and knocks at the door.”

Defining plagiarism

Higher education institutions most often describe this type of academic misconduct as seizing work of others without full credit. Plagiarism could result from insufficiently paraphrasing research and writing performed by others or by inadequately citing thoughts of others. Lesser infractions might occur because of carelessness in conducting research or lack of familiarity with U.S. standards for academic writing.

The American Association of University Professors’ statement on plagiarism, adopted nearly 35 years ago, says those who claimed words, ideas or methods of others with the intent of being credited for that work committed “theft of a special kind.” AAUP said plagiarism was the antithesis of “honest labor that characterizes true scholarship.”

Concern about plagiarism among college students escalated in recent years along with access to generative artificial intelligence capable of completing academic assignments. Sophisticated software has been deployed at universities to test students’ work for plagiarism. AI cross-check resources weren’t a prominent feature of higher education when Muma was in graduate school and completed his dissertation.

Anxiety about academic dishonesty has infiltrated U.S. faculty ranks, including Harvard University where the university’s president resigned, in part, over allegations of plagiarism.

Other recent faculty cases of alleged plagiarism have emerged at Columbia University, University of Maryland, University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Washington.

Wichita State University president Richard Muma inserted phrases, sentences and paragraphs into his doctoral dissertation without proper credit to original authors. Muma declined requests for an interview, but WSU says the 2004 dissertation is “original.” In this image, highlighted phrases denote inadequately attributed material. (Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

‘A shortcut’

In five chapters of Muma’s dissertation, which included findings of an opinion survey of health educators and professionals, Kansas Reflector identified approximately 55 passages of inadequately attributed material.

“That’s a problem in my eyes,” said Jonathan Bailey, founder of Plagiarism Today and a copyright and plagiarism consultant in New Orleans. “When you copy and paste wholesale like that, you’re not proving you have the knowledge and understanding. This person did a shortcut.”

U.S. colleges and universities discipline students, including dismissal, for violating policies requiring they avoid plagiarism by distinguishing their original expression from information drawn from other sources. Plagiarism is considered an especially grave error when perpetrated by graduate students or faculty members expected to be well-versed in scholarly writing.

Individuals engaged in higher education research, teaching or administration told Kansas Reflector the insufficient attribution in Muma’s dissertation reached the level of plagiarism.

Tim Hill, professor of political science at Doane University in Nebraska and recipient of a 2003 doctorate from Ohio State University, said his review led to an undeniable conclusion.

“The standard of the profession says this counts as plagiarism,” Hill said. “I keep thinking (of) being a faculty member at that institution when this breaks. How do you walk into the classroom and say academic honesty is important? From the perspective of the audience, he’s lying to them. It harms everyone involved.”

The International Day of Action for Academic Integrity will be Oct. 16. Wichita State scheduled events during the month to emphasize academic integrity as the responsibility of all faculty, staff and students.

Kansas Rep. Kirk Haskins, a Topeka Democrat who earned a doctorate in higher education at the University of Kansas and a master’s degree at WSU, said he was trained to include quotation marks and other attribution when making use of scholarship from other people.

Haskins, who serves as chairman of graduate-level programs at Baker University in Baldwin City, said taking material without sufficient attribution could suggest an individual didn’t understand dissertation writing practices. Or, he said, it could demonstrate what a person thought he or she could get away with while producing a capstone educational achievement.

“(Muma) has done a commendable job in his time as president,” Haskins said. “However, I find these issues should be taken seriously because it pulls threads of higher ed’s academic integrity.”

Kansas Reflector also interviewed college and university educators without identifying Muma, his job title or employer. These interview subjects were informed of the breadth of attribution issues and that the author was awarded a doctorate, remained a faculty member and was employed as an administrator.

Kansas Sen. Molly Baumgardner, a Louisburg Republican who taught at Johnson County Community College and is now an associate vice president at Pittsburg State University, serves as chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee.

“Every step of the way, it’s a matter of ‘show us your work,’ ” said Baumgardner, who holds a master’s degree. “This notion of appropriation of someone else’s work is critical. A reputation is what can make or break an institution. Anytime someone dishonestly advances, it leaves another in the dust.”

Wichita State University policy on professional ethics says faculty derive obligations from membership in a community of scholars, which includes a duty to “acknowledge their academic debts” to other scholars. In addition, WSU’s definition of research misconduct includes fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. (Thad Allton for Kansas Reflector)

WSU policies

At Wichita State, students found to have violated plagiarism policy could fail a class or receive a warning, probation, suspension or expulsion.

WSU requires faculty to “practice intellectual honesty.” The statement says faculty have a duty to “acknowledge their academic debts.”

“As members of their institution,” the policy manual says, “faculty members seek above all to be effective teachers and scholars.”

Policies regarding research misconduct at WSU, adopted in 1997 and last revised in 2017, cover “fabrication, falsification, plagiarism or other practices that seriously deviate from those that are commonly accepted within the scientific community.”

The Kansas Board of Regents policy manual is silent on faculty plagiarism, said Matt Keith, spokesman for the board. The Board of Regents has responsibility for hiring presidents and chancellors at the state’s six public universities.

Muma was named acting president in September 2020 by the Board of Regents simultaneous to the departure of WSU president Jay Golden. The state board formally appointed him the 15th president of WSU in May 2021.

WSU made Muma its first gay president and Muma was the first physician assistant in the country to rise through the ranks to become a university president.

Muma, in his fourth year as WSU president, received a 4% raise in July to increase his annual salary to $520,000.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and X.