It’s been over a year since Maryland’s flagship research university’s president first came under fire for alleged plagiarism, with no end in sight to the investigation.
The University of Maryland, College Park and the University System of Maryland both called for a review of one of Darryll Pines’ co-authored journal articles last October, the institutions said in a joint statement. Their decision followed a report by conservative website The Daily Wire, which claimed that Pines had copied language from a 1996 website.
Pines asked for an independent review shortly after the allegations emerged last September, but it has not yet finished, despite the high stakes: “The USM considers misconduct in scholarly work by any of its employees a breach of contract,” the system’s policy states. Disciplinary action, including termination, can result for those found guilty of misconduct, such as plagiarism.
“These types of reviews can take some time to conclude. In many cases, these reviews can take longer than a year,” University System of Maryland spokesperson Michael Sandler said in an email to The Baltimore Sun this week. Sandler could not give an exact date for when the investigation began.
“One reason for the length of time is that these reviews must be conducted by individuals who have no relationship with the person being reviewed,” Sandler wrote. “They must also have the same level — or greater level — of expertise as the person being reviewed. The length of the inquiry in this particular matter is not unusual.”
Last week, University of Maryland Eastern Shore President Heidi Anderson agreed to a review of her work after a complaint from a former professor accused her of having copied material in her 1986 doctoral dissertation. And last year, Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned after being accused of plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation by conservative activists.
The allegations against Pines involve two papers with passages that are reportedly nearly identical to those found on a website about “wavelets,” then-maintained by Australian master’s student Joshua Altmann.
Neither Pines and co-author Liming Salvino’s 2002 paper “Health Monitoring of One Dimensional Structures Using Empirical Mode Decomposition and the Hilbert-Huang Transform,” nor their 2006 paper “Structural health monitoring using empirical mode decomposition and the Hilbert phase,” cited Altmann’s tutorial website.
For example, Pines’ and Salvino’s section on time domain analysis in signal processing methods begins: “Prior to the discovery of the FFT and the implementation of the first real-time spectral analyzers, vibration analysis was predominantly performed by looking at details of the time domain waveform of the signal.”
Altmann’s section reads: “Prior to the discovery of the FFT and the implementation of the first real-time spectral analysers, vibration analysis was predominantly performed by looking at the time waveform of the signal.”
“What’s in there really looks to me like sort of textbook, garden-variety plagiarism,” said David Rettinger, University of Tulsa psychology professor, academic integrity researcher who has written two books on the subject, and serves as president emeritus of the International Center for Academic Integrity. “It’s using the same material … and it’s doing so without citing sources.”
The intervening months haven’t yielded an official determination from either the university or the university system.
A fair investigation with due process can take a while, Rettinger said. A year having lapsed since the calls for investigations from the school and university system is “not abnormal, but it does seem too long to me,” he said.
Altmann and Salvino did not respond to requests for comment. The University of Maryland and the University System are using international law firm Ropes & Gray to lead the review. The law firm referred The Sun to the University of Maryland’s media relations office, which declined to comment.
In an email Pines sent to faculty last year, obtained by The Sun, he said he did not believe there was merit to The Daily Wire’s claims, though he acknowledged “recurrent language in the introductory sections.”
“I have always prided myself on producing the highest-quality scientific work over nearly four decades of submitting peer-reviewed research to academic journals,” Pines wrote, before saying he holds himself to the same standards as his colleagues across the university. Pines said he had immediately contacted Salvino to review the manuscript.
The allegations don’t suggest that Pines and Salvino fabricated their data or were dishonest about their methods or conclusions, which are more severe forms of academic dishonesty, Rettinger said.
“Based on what I’ve read, it doesn’t seem like it would affect the conclusions of either paper. So is this wrong? Yes. Should it be sanctioned? Yes. Is it a big deal? I don’t think so.”
“I think … a career death sentence would be inappropriate here,” Rettinger said. Even a week’s suspension would “seem like a pretty severe penalty for something that happened a long time ago and that didn’t affect the outcome of the search itself.”
“I feel like this is the sort of thing where you put a notation on the article and maybe move on.”
Pines was appointed to the presidency in 2020, after having been the dean and Nariman Farvardin Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the A. James Clark School of Engineering since 2009, the announcement from the university system says.
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