Wichita State president admits ‘technical oversights’ in dissertation — but it looks worse

Human beings make mistakes.

What Wichita State University president Richard Muma did doesn’t look like a mistake to me.

Crafting the doctoral dissertation he submitted, for a degree he accepted, requires a string of deliberate choices. Those choices arguably disqualify someone who made them from holding a position of high academic leadership. That’s the takeaway from Kansas Reflector senior reporter Tim Carpenter’s investigative report on Muma, which uncovered more than 50 instances in which the leader failed to properly attribute scholars in his doctoral dissertation.

Such choices are not, as Muma suggested in a statement released Monday, “technical oversights.”

They point instead to trustworthiness and credibility.

It’s unfortunate that in responding, the president and the university have decided to cast aspersions on Kansas Reflector and refer to internal investigations that they have not made public. The response suggests that they believe they can make this story and the awkward questions it raises disappear. I don’t think Kansans or WSU students, faculty or alumni will allow that to happen.

Muma wrote “the reporter refused to share specific allegations until publishing his article today.”

In fact, Kansas Reflector clearly explained why it wanted to interview Muma and tried repeatedly over several weeks to do so.

Muma writes about a subsequent internal and external review of his dissertation “by a leading expert in plagiarism, who is unaffiliated with the university.”

WSU has not released the inquiry or the name of that leading expert. Carpenter talked to many more people, who did give their names: “Ten faculty at public and private colleges and universities said in interviews Muma’s dissertation amounted to plagiarism,” he wrote.

But hey, people have different opinions. Let’s take a break to look over at the towers of the Ivy League.

Here’s what Harvard University has to say on the topic: “In academic writing, it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source in your paper. It doesn’t matter whether the source is a published author, another student, a website without clear authorship, a website that sells academic papers, or any other person: Taking credit for anyone else’s work is stealing, and it is unacceptable in all academic situations, whether you do it intentionally or by accident.”

Harvard also has a helpful section on paraphrasing, or using information without quotation marks in your work: “When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source’s ideas in your own words. It’s not enough to change a few words here and there and leave the rest; instead, you must completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words. If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation.”

Muma was not an undergraduate student when he wrote his dissertation. He was already a tenured professor and department chair.

Did he actually not know how to cite his work properly?

As a longtime journalist, I think about attribution a lot. I assiduously work to credit other reporters and opinion writers in my own columns. In my years as a reporter, copy editor and freelance writer, it was drilled into me — and I then drilled into others — the importance of crediting every source in every instance. As a features editor in Concord, New Hampshire, I sweated over writing briefs for the Arts and Entertainment section, making sure that my words didn’t even echo those in press releases.

If you’re asking others to trust what you do, you must prove yourself worthy of that trust.

With all that being said, let’s return to my initial sentence. Mistakes do happen. Writers might leave out attribution or forget quote marks or fail to paraphrase sufficiently. But such isolated gaffes should be promptly disclosed and corrected. Muma’s dissertation instead sat on a shelf for 20 years, while its author climbed the academic ladder.

In his statement Monday, the president writes that the “affected text consists of less than 5% of my entire dissertation.” Note the use of a definitive-sounding percentage, coming from an unreleased internal inquiry. Does Muma believe that WSU students’ work therefore can contain less than 5% of misattributed material when they turn it in? I wonder what WSU professors would have to say about that.

In the meantime, take a look at the actual evidence, as compiled by Carpenter. Decide for yourself.

I know what I believe. College presidents and academics, along with students and journalists and everyone else in the public square, should aspire to the highest standards.

Not the least they can get away with.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, 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.

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.