WICHITA — Wichita State University president Richard Muma failed to give proper credit to more than 20 authors after copying their writing in his doctoral dissertation.
Muma, president of the university since 2020, runs afoul of academic standards and university policies by including extensive amounts of inadequately attributed material into his 2004 dissertation, according to academic professionals who reviewed Muma’s work.
A Kansas Reflector comparison of Muma’s 88-page dissertation with earlier scholarly work uncovered improperly ascribed phrases, sentences and paragraphs. In some cases, text copied from books and journals comprised the majority of entire pages in Muma’s dissertation.
Ten faculty at public and private colleges and universities said in interviews Muma’s dissertation amounted to plagiarism. None embraced Muma’s view that his dissertation adhered to academic publication standards.
Steven Mintz, a history professor at University of Texas- Austin who has authored or edited 15 books and found plagiarism of his own writing in international publications, said Muma’s dissertation would give the university a “black eye.”
“It is a form of theft. In my department, if I let a dissertation get to that stage, well, a student would be expelled, but I would be ostracized,” Mintz said.
Muma denied he plagiarized his dissertation through Wichita State spokeswoman Lainie Mazzullo-Hart, who said allegations of academic misconduct, especially assertions of plagiarism, were a serious matter.
Despite repeated requests via phone and email over five weeks, WSU declined to make Muma available for an interview.
“What I can share with you is that Dr. Muma vehemently denies any accusation of plagiarism and maintains that the research, analysis and conclusions in his dissertation were entirely original, and all referenced material were properly cited in accordance with academic standards,” Mazzullo-Hart said.
Muma’s dissertation, “Use of Mintzberg’s Model of Managerial Roles as a Framework to Describe a Population of
See WSU, Page 3.
Academic Health Profession Administrators,” relied on parentheses — in the form of (Bennett, 1983) — to cite sources. He also included reference materials in a bibliography.
But Muma’s research paper lacked routine techniques for attributing other authors’ work. Typically, attribution is made through single or double quotation marks, italics or indentation of margins on the page.
Muma was a tenured professor and department chair at the time he submitted the dissertation on physician assistant education programs to a faculty review panel at University of Missouri-St. Louis. The project earned him a doctorate in higher education. With that credential, Muma advanced through the hierarchy at WSU from department chairman to vice president, provost and president.
Misappropriated text started with the first sentence in his dissertation: It was a mirror image to the opening of the 1983 book “Managing the Academic Department” by John Bennett, who earned a doctorate at Yale University, served as a college provost and authored more than 100 articles and six books.
“Important? Definitely. Overworked? Probably. Prepared for the job? Rarely. This is the typical academic department chairperson,” Bennett wrote.
Muma copied the sequence word for word, but didn’t place quotation marks around the text to show readers the prose was created by someone else. Muma replicated that pattern dozens of times in his dissertation.
Of 255 words on the first page of Muma’s dissertation, more than 150 were copied from published work by Bennett and two other scholars, Kathleen Stassen Berger and Allan Tucker.
In a lengthy passage on Page 22, Muma deleted quote marks from borrowed text, keeping the reader in the dark that there was an original author. On Page 24 of the dissertation, three-fourths of 284 words were copied from other scholarly writing and pasted into the dissertation. All but a handful of 230 words on Page 29 were drawn verbatim from previously published academic work.
In 2002, for example, Berger wrote an academic article on “Inevitable Conflicts of a Department Chair.” Her distinctive opening lines: “Too much to do, too little time. Deadlines ignored; demands not met; requests trashed. Students, faculty, staff, and administrators queue up with phone messages, mailbox memos, emails and knocks on my door.”
Muma’s casting two years later echoed Berger: “It seems that academic department chairs have too much to do and no time to do it. Frequently they ignore deadlines, have demands that are not met, and requests are not answered.” That was followed by verbatim text: “Students, faculty, staff, and administrators queue up with phone messages, mailbox memos, emails, and knocks at the door.”
Higher education institutions most often describe this type of academic misconduct as seizing work of others without full credit. Plagiarism could result from insufficiently paraphrasing research and writing performed by others or by inadequately citing thoughts of others. Lesser infractions might occur because of carelessness in conducting research or lack of familiarity with U.S. standards for academic writing.
