Columnist Max McCoy writes about the case of Wichita State University President Richard Muma, who acknowledged issues with his doctoral dissertation of 20 years ago. (Thad Allton for Kansas Reflector)
If one of my students had plagiarized the way Richard Muma did in his doctoral dissertation, I would have flunked them.
Because words — and the ideas they convey — matter.
As I used to explain to hundreds of students in my mass communication class — where a research paper of no less than 12 pages was a requirement to pass — original research is the heart of scholarship. Plagiarism, intentional or not, is stealing the work of others. The word itself comes from the Latin plagarius, meaning kidnapper.
In case you missed it, the plagiarism scandal erupted Oct. 7, when the Kansas Reflector’s Tim Carpenter reported on problems with Muma’s dissertation , written years ago as a major part of the requirements for a doctorate in education. Muma, the president of Wichita State University since 2021, had used passages from more than 20 authors without proper attribution in his slim, 88-page dissertation on managerial roles in healthcare administrators. Go here for the Reflector’s side-by-side comparison of some offending passages.
The day Carpenter’s story posted, Muma fired off a letter to the campus community that claimed the errors were “technical in nature,” amounted to no more than 5% of the dissertation, and that an internal inquiry had found no misconduct. He also said the errors would be corrected.
This is the kind of nonsense students who are caught cheating say.
The errors were unintended — Golly, how was I supposed to know that direct quotes should be put in quotation marks or otherwise set off? I only did it a few times. I did the research, honest, and my roommate took a look at it and said it was OK. I’ll fix it if only you’ll give me a second chance.
Such excuses don’t work for high school students, and they absolutely should not work for a college president.
It’s also not the first time a Wichita educator has been accused of academic misconduct by a journalist. In 1992, Eagle columnist and writing coach Donald Williams — himself a holder of a PhD in English — devoted a full op-ed page accusing the recently hired Wichita school superintendent, Larry Vaughn, of plagiarism in his University of Houston 70-page dissertation.
“It is full of inaccuracies in citation, errors in grammar and departures from reasonable standards of writing and self-editing,” Williams wrote. “And it contains several examples — they may well reflect mere carelessness or haste — of something close to that greatest of scholarly sins, plagiarism.”
Williams said Vaughn copied sentences from other works. He even called Vaughn’s dissertation adviser at the University of Houston to ask if he would reconsider Vaughn’s dissertation, considering the issues with it. The adviser’s only comment was to say he would have no comment.
The most famous case of plagiarism in the state, however, is likely a 2002 incident at Piper High School, in a neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas. Twenty-eight students in a 10th-grade biology course were flunked for copying. The students in Christine Pelton’s class were assigned to write a research paper about leaves, but when she used an online plagiarism checker she discovered about a quarter of the 118-member class had copied from the internet and other sources. When the principal, under orders from the school board, directed Pelton to reduce the penalty by changing the project’s overall weight in the class, a move that would allow nearly all of the plagiarists to pass — but would be punishing for the students who didn’t cheat, Pelton resigned.
So did many of her colleagues.
The Wyandotte County district attorney filed a petition against the school board for violating the Kansas Open Meetings Act because the board voted in secret to reverse Pelton’s decision to give zero points to the cheaters. The seven board members agreed to pay fines of $250 in exchange for the prosecutor dropping the suit, but they refused to change the vote reversing the grades. The board said the open meetings breach was a “technical and unintentional violation” of state law, the Associated Press reported.
Pelton was recognized for her efforts to bring honesty to the classroom by a special certificate — and a standing ovation — from the Kansas House, reported another AP story carried by the Manhattan Mercury.
Good for Pelton.
For 17 years, I taught journalism and some English courses at Emporia State University, where I was often confronted with the kind of academic misconduct Muma engaged in. Despite being shown how to properly cite sources, offenders typically didn’t understand how or under deadline pressure had resorted to copy-and-paste from legitimate authors. This last particularly rankled me, because nobody should be allowed to steal somebody else’s words and pass them off as their own. It’s a particularly odious kind of theft, a form of stolen rigor that should outrage anybody who respects authorship, creativity and original research.
As an author, I will admit this is a topic of particular interest. I’ve had others steal not only entire articles of mine, but entire books, and offer them for sale on Amazon. I also think good scholarship is like good journalism — it’s accurate, accountable, and cites sources unless there is a compelling reason not to.
For transparency, let me say that I have some history with the Kansas Board of Regents. I’m among 11 individuals who are suing in federal court, after Emporia State, with the blessing of the Kansas Board of Regents, suspended tenure and fired us. We were among 33 who were let go in 2022. But all that is another story.
I don’t know Muma and have never worked for Wichita State University. My thoughts on plagiarism come from a life founded on authorship — of newspaper articles, columns, and books — and having taught for the better part of a couple of decades.
Every semester or so I had a student who committed the same kinds of “errors” Muma did in his dissertation. It was never a pleasant experience — and was often accompanied by tears or anger on the student’s part — but there could be positive outcomes. If the student seemed genuinely confused about the rigor needed in academic research, I would show them the proper use of paraphrasing, direct quotes, and citation. We had gone over all of this before in class when they were given the research paper assignment, and most also had it drilled into them in Comp II. It was extra work for me, but I hope I salvaged some academic careers in those sessions. Often, I referred them to Purdue’s Online Writing Lab for help.
But then there were the students who knew better but insisted they did no wrong anyway. Some of the most egregious examples: those who purchased essays online, submitted entire articles or book chapters, or used cut-and-paste to make something resembling original work.
This last method appeared to be Muma’s favorite.
His dissertation begins with this (but without the quotation marks):
“Important? Definitely. Overworked? Probably. Prepared for the jobs? Rarely. This is the typical academic department chairperson.”
That’s a fine opening. The problem is that none of it is Muma’s. It’s lifted word-for-word from a 1983 book by John Beecher Bennett. There is a parenthetical citation at the end, and that would be appropriate had Musa paraphrased. But what Musa did was use a direct quote without the quotation marks to signify that it was somebody else’s words. He goes on to do the same thing, in dozens of instances, incorrectly citing 20 some authors.
This is no technical mistake.
From a helpful poster by the Purdue writing lab: “Copying exactly: cite as a quotation! “
Yes, the original is in red and includes the exclamation point.
Remove the words and thoughts of others from that first page of Muma’s dissertation and you are left with nothing. Of the 255 words on that page, Carpenter reported, more than 150 were copied without quotation marks from the work of Bennett and other authors. Sadly, Musa couldn’t even start his own dissertation in his own words.
And yet — and yet! — Muma claimed in his campus letter that while the university’s investigation suggested he should have included “the use of quotation marks around reuse of text,” it concluded there was no misconduct.
Ahem. Reuse of text, really?
First, the university should release its internal inquiry in full so we don’t have to take Muma’s word for it. Hats off to Carpenter, who did a fine job of surveying the damage. Second, no matter what the internal probe revealed, WSU should promptly turn the matter over to outside experts on academic integrity to conduct a full and independent review. While I’m sure there are some fine scholars at WSU, nobody — not a vice president, provost, or research officer — should be asked to investigate their own boss. Especially one who makes, according to Carpenter’s reporting, $520,000 a year.
Meanwhile, KBOR should suspend Muma while the independent inquiry proceeds.
And University of Missouri-St. Louis should launch its own investigation into how such shoddy scholarship could get a dissertation committee’s seal of approval — and consider rescinding that approval. Muma should not be allowed a do-over for a dissertation completed in 2004.
Why should we care?
Because academic integrity should be at the heart of every university worth the name.
“Defending free inquiry by their associates and respecting the opinions of others, in the exchange of criticism and ideas, professors must also be rigorously honest in acknowledging their academic debts,” declares the American Association of University Professors in its statement on plagiarism.
Muma’s offenses are not the kind of unconscious plagiarism described by Mark Twain in a consoling letter to Helen Keller, who had been accused of literary stealing for a short story written when Keller was 11 years old. It is also not the kind of synergistic blending of other stories or genres to make something new, such as in the 2002-03 space Western series “Firefly” or the 2007 miniseries “Tin Man” that reimagined “The Wizard of Oz.”
Muma’s dissertation wasn’t creative in nature, but was to have been based on original research. While the research at the heart of the dissertation may indeed be original — can we check that now, please? — what it relied on for its narrative was theft from other scholars. While acknowledging (incompletely) the source of the ideas, Muma pocketed for himself the most valuable aspect — the author’s expression of those ideas in their own words.
This is kidnapping of the highest order.
It will be challenging now for all of those who teach freshman composition at Wichita State University to convey the gravity of careful research and attribution when the university president has not only transgressed, but used the institution to defend the transgression. It will be difficult for professors to fail students for blatant examples of plagiarism when the university president himself has defended the use of stacked cut-and-paste passages as a “technical error.” It will be impossible for the provost and other university administrators to take any high ground on academic integrity when they have condoned a different standard for the university president.
We’ll see if anyone’s got the guts to flunk Richard Muma.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here .
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