Wichita State University students and faculty are considering what academic misconduct allegations made earlier this week against the president may mean — if anything — for the integrity of the university.

Some at the university are questioning the severity and validity of the plagiarism accusations facing President Richard Muma.

“Looking at the evidence, honestly, I think it’s absolutely trumped up,” said Francis Connor, associate professor of English. “I would not call it plagiarism. He should have been more accurate in putting things in quotation marks, but he absolutely cited everything … It’s not plagiarism; it’s bad citation.”

WSU’s Policy and Procedures Manual defines plagiarism as “representing the words, ideas, graphics, or any portion of another’s work, whether published or unpublished, as one’s own and/or without appropriate and/or accurate citation/attribution.”

Taking a step back — Muma’s 2004 dissertation

Twenty years ago, Muma — already a tenured faculty member and department chair at Wichita State — submitted an 88-page dissertation to a faculty review panel at the University of Missouri-St. Louis for his doctorate in higher education. 

Two decades and several big promotions later, Muma’s dissertation is now subject to scrutiny over his failure to attribute 55 passages, more than 750 words, according to the Kansas Reflector. 

While Muma did use parentheses to cite sources and included a complete bibliography, segments of his dissertation lacked quotations or other forms of attribution. Copied areas lacking quotations ranged from the opening sentence to paragraph chunks throughout the dissertation.

According to a statement from Muma sent to faculty, staff and students immediately following the publication of The Reflector story, this lack of attribution constituted 5% of his 88-page dissertation — approximately five pages.

“To be clear, I attributed and cited all sources in my dissertation, and I have complete confidence in the integrity and originality of my research,” Muma said in the statement. “These are technical oversights where text was reused, and those attributions did not have quotation marks, and I am taking steps to make corrections.”

The letter did not specify what steps were being taken. 

Academic misconduct or ‘technical oversight’?

Assistant professor and chair of the philosophy department Patrick Bondy said the real debate depends on what is considered academic misconduct and what is considered a “technical oversight.”

“That (mistakes) happens here or there; it’s not a big deal,” Bondy said. “That’s the main thing: if you provided the records and if you didn’t include the quotation marks, then, well … that is a technical error … but not a violation of ethical standards.”

Nickolas Solomey, a professor of math, statistics and physics at WSU, agreed. 

Solomey said he saw Muma’s response before attempting to read the Kansas Reflector story.

“I started it, but then I thought, ‘This is just ridiculous,’” he said.

He said it’s not unusual for small parts of papers, even theses and dissertations, to be incorrectly cited. 

Associate history professor George Dehner said such practices likely wouldn’t fly in the history department.

“Anytime you’re using the language of somebody without proper attribution, it’s a problem,” Dehner said. “(Muma) did have citations saying … ‘This is where I got it from,’ but not enclosing it in quotation marks would be something that we would more than frown on in the Department of History.”

Upon hearing the allegations of plagiarism four weeks ago, Muma said he called for the university to conduct an inquiry to weigh the validity of the claims. 

WSU Provost Shirley Lefever conducted the inquiry with the help of the university’s research officer, John Tomblin. The review also had an external section, with a “leading expert in plagiarism, who is unaffiliated with the university,” according to the statement.

“The facts led to a determination that these were technical omissions that did not rise to the level of misconduct, and the matter was closed,” Muma said. 

Dehner said he’s unsure what percentage of plagiarism would be acceptable.

“I would say that mistakes of that nature are things that do not reflect well in scholarship,” Dehner said.

Plagiarism detection

Ablah Library resource specialists Sara Rue and Meghann Kuhlmann said plagiarism and proper citation detection software looked different in 2004 when Muma’s dissertation was published. That’s because most of the programs used now didn’t exist two decades ago.

“Now, detection software is better,” Kuhlmann said. “So, if (Muma) had done … that 20 years ago, then it would have been flagged, and he would have been able to fix it at the time.”

The librarians said that just because Muma’s dissertation writing process was done years ago doesn’t mean he didn’t have access to online resources.

Muma is not the only university president to be met with plagiarism allegations recently. In January, former Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned amidst doubts about academic integrity, as well as the university’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Connor said the allegations against Muma raised concerns about the future of plagiarism checks in academia.

“This is something that is going to happen a lot because it’s so (much) easier to take someone’s dissertation, digitize the text and just search for chunks of it using Google Books or other, you know, digital corpuses or things like that,” Connor said.

Students react

The Sunflower asked around 20 students how they felt about the situation. Some declined to speak, citing their employment at the university and fear of retaliation.

After a Sunflower reporter visited the Shocker Success Center on Monday, an email was sent out to some staff, telling them not to speak with reporters at work, although they were free to speak off the clock.  

“If they ask you questions while you are on the clock, please respond to any questions with ‘I don’t know, and no other staff are able to answer your questions,’” the email said.

Many students confessed they had little knowledge of the allegations. What most had heard was prompted by the letter from Muma.

Jay Russell, a second-year journalism and media production major, said he’s “very interested” in the story but doesn’t think the instances of missing quotations in Muma’s work are necessarily academic misconduct.

He clarified that he had not read the original story yet, only the letter from Muma.

“I am interested to see what the university does since they take plagiarism so seriously,” Russell said. “If it was just a technical issue where there was no quotation marks and the work was still cited in the work cited, then I don’t think that that is an issue.”

Senior creative writing student Jay Dewiel was completely indifferent.

“When I saw that, at first, I was like, ‘Oh, here’s someone that fucked up again.’ And I saw it was 20 years ago, and it seems so small and like, genuinely, who gives a fuck?” Dewiel said. “Maybe I’m the odd one out. I don’t care. I do not care. Like, I basically just deleted the email as I read it.”

Political science student Jerica George questioned the intention and relevancy of the Reflector article.

She said she didn’t suspect “malintent” in Muma’s mistakes and that his decision to correct his dissertation speaks to his “integrity and his being as a person.”

WSU’s Academic Integrity policy states that “unless specifically noted in the policy definition, intent is not a required element to establish a policy violation.”

“It’s an unfortunate happening,” George said. “But again … it’s one of those things where the technical error doesn’t (overshadow) how he came (up) with the research and the validity of the research he did.”