WSU says internal inquiry compels attribution corrections to doctoral paper
BY: TIM CARPENTER
Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — Kansas academics point to signs of plagiarism in Wichita State University President Richard Muma’s doctoral dissertation, but there’s a nuanced dispute about consequences for breaking scholarly writing protocol.
Click here to view some of the evidence
Debate emerged on campuses throughout the state since Monday when Kansas Reflector published an investigation of Muma’s 2004 dissertation that led to awarding of a doctorate by University of Missouri-St. Louis. More than 10 university professors employed outside of WSU told the Reflector that Muma’s use of dozens of passages from journals and books — without quotation marks to fully credit verbatim writing of others — met the definition of plagiarism.
In response, Muma said an internal, confidential review led by WSU administrators concluded he wasn’t guilty of misconduct. However, he said, there were instances in the dissertation where “attribution should have included the use of quotation marks around reuse of text.” The president said he would submit to UMSL a revised version correcting attribution in up to 5% of his dissertation. He also said “the matter was closed.”
But that doesn’t satisfy everyone.
Elizabeth Heilman, a Wichita State professor of education, said she was skeptical of WSU’s internal analysis of about 50 instances in which Muma borrowed the writing of more than 20 scholars.
“Issues with Muma’s dissertation are not technical omissions as he has stated. The issue raised is plagiarism and research misconduct,” Heilman said.
Chris Dudley, an assistant clinical professor in Wichita State’s physician assistant program, said missing quotation marks in Muma’s dissertation were “definitely a mistake,” but the dissertation contained references that could lead readers to original authors.
“There is a big difference between clerical/grammatical errors and not citing the author,” said Dudley, who graduated from WSU’s physician assistant program in 2008. “Both fall under the definition of plagiarism, but I think we can agree one is way worse than the other.”
Dudley said the Reflector’s reporting “stinks of a witch hunt” as if someone were “trying to tear down the reputation of someone who has worked in health care and who now leads a university brilliantly.”
Muma, who has worked at Wichita State for nearly 30 years, was a tenured professor and chairman of the physician assistant program at WSU when he completed the dissertation. He was promoted to vice president and provost before appointed president in 2020 by the Kansas Board of Regents.
Before publication of the story, Muma said he was confident his dissertation was “original.” He later said the article “raised misrepresentations about the academic integrity” of his dissertation.
The Reflector manually examined Muma’s 88-page dissertation on management of physician assistant programs. Copies of original articles and books were acquired for line-by-line comparisons to the dissertation. The extent of the copying by Muma led a diverse group of university educators interviewed by the Reflector to the conclusion the dissertation was partially plagiarized.
Dan Hoyt, a professor of English at Kansas State University, said it would be wrong for a college freshman to leave out quotation marks to highlight contributions of other writers. It would be “inexcusable” for someone to make the same mistake in a doctoral dissertation, he said.
“I think you could easily make the case this is plagiarism,” Hoyt said. “It does all kinds of harm to the world of ideas and the world of education.”
Jim Leiker, a history professor at Johnson County Community College, said the scholarly exception made for WSU’s president sent the wrong message to the university’s students. The bottom line, he said, was “we should hold the president of an institution such as WSU to a higher standard than we hold our students.”
Eve Levin, professor emeritus at the University of Kansas, said UMSL should rescind the doctoral degree it awarded to Muma because he produced a dissertation that claimed the words of others as his own.
“If he didn’t know better, he’s unqualified to be a university faculty member, much less a university president,” she said. “If he did know better, but was too sloppy in his research methods, he’s unqualified. If he did know better and deliberately decided to copy other scholars’ words, he’s unqualified.”