Allan Schmidt, a member of the Wichita State University presidential search committee and a former member of the Kansas Board of Regents, says controversy about WSU President Richard Muma's dissertation makes clear that candidates for top university administrative jobs should have their academic writing vetted. (Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector)
WICHITA — A former Kansas Board of Regents member who made the motion to hire Wichita State University President Richard Muma says concerns over plagiarism in Muma’s doctoral dissertation illustrate the need to thoroughly evaluate academic writing of applicants for university leadership jobs in the state.
In May 2021, Allan Schmidt made the motion to appoint Richard Muma as WSU’s 15th president, and Schmidt has remained an enthusiastic supporter of Muma. But he said controversy about Muma’s dissertation showed the Board of Regents’ standard practice should be to scrutinize scholarly publications of candidates for university president or chancellor.
He said consultants hired to assist the Board of Regents and the 22-person presidential search committee of faculty, staff, students, alumni and community members didn’t raise red flags about the 2004 dissertation.
“We hired a company that vets each one of the candidates, particularly the ones that get to the final round,” said Schmidt, who was on the WSU search committee. “We had no idea. Never was this brought up.”
The AGB search firm held the contract to assist with recruiting candidates in the search that led to Muma’s hiring. AGB consultants Sally Mason, a former president of the University of Iowa, and Garry Owens, who has a doctorate from University of Wisconsin, oversaw the search. They didn’t return calls for comment about their work for WSU.
When Kansas Reflector approached Wichita State about problems with Muma’s dissertation weeks before publishing a story, Muma asked subordinates in the WSU administration to review his Ph.D. dissertation, according to a statement the university released after the story published Oct. 7. Muma said the confidential internal survey indicated he neglected to properly attribute up to 5% of text in his 88-page dissertation.
Muma said the report concluded he didn’t commit plagiarism, but the president did pledge to submit a corrected version of his dissertation to University of Missouri-St. Louis, which granted his doctoral degree.
Schmidt, who earned master’s degrees at Fort Hays State University and the U.S. Army War College, said it was important for Muma to amend the dissertation because academic writers had a public obligation to accurately cite scholarly work of others. He said attribution issues in Muma’s dissertation were “in the serious range, but not very serious.”
Kansas Reflector’s examination of Muma’s dissertation found he copied more than 20 scholars without enclosing their words in quotation marks, which implies the words are Muma’s. Instead, Muma chose to place the last name of original authors in parentheses near passages in the dissertation that were drawn from journals and books. In a statement, Muma said attribution issues in the dissertation were “technical oversights.”
However, lack of full attribution convinced more than 10 professors not connected with Wichita State that the dissertation was partially plagiarized.
“This seems pretty egregious and seems to be in the camp of plagiarism,” said Jason McCollom, an associate professor of history at Missouri State University-West Plains and a recipient of a doctorate from University of Arkansas. “It’s not professional practice. It’s sloppy writing. A dissertation should be original content. Copying and pasting should not be part of a doctoral dissertation.”
On Wednesday and Thursday, members of the Board of Regents scheduled visits to the Wichita State campus. The Board of Regents did not produce an agenda, but WSU says faculty and staff were to make a series of presentations to the nine board members.
The only comment from the Board of Regents regarding Muma’s dissertation came from Blake Flanders, the board’s president and a member of the WSU search committee. Flanders declined interview requests, but noted WSU’s internal study showed “no academic misconduct.”
Steve Walentik, director of public relations for USML, said the university “has not received a request from Richard Muma to take any action regarding his dissertation.”
“Generally, if we receive such a request, the university will review the nature of the request, do an appropriate assessment and determine, from an academic perspective, whether any changes need to be made,” Walentik said.
University presidency scholars James Finkelstein, professor emeritus at George Mason University, and Judith Wilde, a research professor at GMU, said in a joint phone interview that the university that granted a problematic doctoral degree was obligated to launch an inquiry.
“When the alleged misconduct involves a dissertation,” Finkelstein said, “it is the responsibility of the degree-granting institution to make a determination if misconduct occurred.”
Wilde and Finkelstein said it would be insufficient for the WSU president to undergo nothing more than an in-house inquiry handled by administrators working under him.
Wilde said that in the past she would randomly sample academic writing of job applicants for plagiarism, but these days that task was important enough to be delegated to consultants or search committees.
“It’s easy enough to check,” she said. “Why not do it?”
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