The University of Maryland said it was conducting a review of claims that its president, Darryll J. Pines, plagiarized significant portions of a 2002 scholarly paper.
The university’s decision to conduct a review followed disclosures in The Daily Wire, a publication co-founded by the conservative activist Ben Shapiro. Dr. Pines asked that the allegations be investigated. While he acknowledged in a letter to the Maryland faculty that there had been “recurrent language,” in his work, he denied there was merit to claims of plagiarism.
The claim against Dr. Pines comes after a series of plagiarism accusations have been leveled at academics — many of them focused on diversity efforts in universities and many of them Black — in recent months. Most notably, anonymous plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, the former Harvard president, were among the factors that led to her resignation early this year.
In his letter to the Maryland faculty, Dr. Pines, who is Black, noted that like other academics he had recently “come under scrutiny and attack, both personally and professionally, for a variety of reasons, including aspersions placed on my decision-making and my values.”
Dr. Pines, a graduate of M.I.T. and a professor of aerospace engineering, has a large body of work, including dozens of papers on topics such as spacecraft navigation and a human-powered helicopter. In its article, The Daily Wire ran very similar excerpts from work published by Dr. Pines and a co-author, Liming Salvino, alongside those from a piece published in 1996 by Joshua Altmann, then a university student in Australia.
Dr. Altmann could not be reached for comment, nor could Dr. Salvino, a former program officer with the Office of Naval Research who was Dr. Pines’s co-author on the publication, which looked at ways to examine the health of structures.
Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism consultant in New Orleans and the publisher of Plagiarism Today, said he regarded the allegations as “serious,” also noting that the work by Dr. Altmann was not credited in Dr. Pines’s work.
“We’re talking about basically one-third of the entire paper is either verbatim or near verbatim without the source being indicated,” Mr. Bailey said.
But noting that no other questions had been raised about Dr. Pines’s other scholarly publications, Mr. Bailey suggested that the similar language could be the result of extraneous factors.
“If someone is a plagiarist typically you would expect to see more instances,” Mr. Bailey said.
Mr. Bailey noted that similar plagiarism complaints have been leveled recently against diversity officers at Harvard, Columbia and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, among others. Earlier this month, the University of Washington dismissed a claim against the sociologist and author of “White Fragility,” Robin DiAngelo, that said she had plagiarized portions of her 2004 dissertation.
The latest accusations against Dr. Pines, who has served as the university’s president since 2020, followed reporting last month by The Daily Wire that was critical of the president’s response to pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Maryland.
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
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Publish date : 2024-09-20 07:37:00
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