University of Maryland President Darryll J. Pines announced Wednesday that he has requested an independent review of his research following accusations that he plagiarized a research paper more than 20 years ago.

The accusations against Pines surfaced Tuesday in The Daily Wire. The article alleges that 1,500 words of a 5,000-word paper co-authored by Pines and published in 2002 were plagiarized from a tutorial website called “Surfing the Wavelets” that was last updated in 1996.

Pines, a professor of aerospace engineering, was already part of the UMD faculty at the time his 2002 paper was published. Pines is the university’s first Black president, appointed in 2020. He is the latest in a slew of higher education officials who have been accused of plagiarism.

“Like many of my fellow higher education presidents and chancellors, I have come under aggressive scrutiny, both personally and professionally,” Pines wrote in an email to faculty Wednesday evening. “While I am steadfast that our results, data and findings are sound, I acknowledge recurrent language in the introductory sections.”

The Office of Research Integrity will review his work, Pines wrote, and the findings will be shared with Chancellor Jay Perman through the Office of Faculty Affairs in the provost’s office.

“While I do not believe there is merit to these claims, an impartial review is in the best interest of the university,” Pines wrote.

The Banner obtained a copy of the paper, published by the International Society for Optics and Photonics, or SPIE, as part of a conference. One section of the paper is nearly identical to a section of the tutorial website. The paper does not cite or reference that website or its author, Joshua Altmann.

Altmann could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The Daily Wire article also claims that Pines and his co-author, Liming Salvino, reused a large portion of their 2002 paper with the allegedly plagiarized sections for another paper published in 2006.

Salvino, who is an executive in residence in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University, did not respond Wednesday to a request for comment. Pines said in his email to faculty that he and his co-author immediately reviewed the manuscript when the allegations surfaced.

Jonathan Bailey, an expert who has been studying plagiarism for nearly 20 years, said the uptick in plagiarism accusations over the last year has targeted people of color, in particular. The Daily Wire is a conservative publication associated with national figures who often rail against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and specialize in incendiary content.

Often, those allegations are dubious and weak, centered on just a few sentences or poorly rewritten paragraphs, he said. But the accusations against Pines “appears to be one of the stronger” cases.

“Here, we have whole sections of a paper that are near verbatim or verbatim,” Bailey said.

In January, Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard president less than a month after conservative activists alleged that Gay had plagiarized sections of her dissertation in the 1990s; additional accusations aiming at Gay’s body of work later surfaced.

Then in February, Alade McKen, who was in charge of diversity, equity and inclusion at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, was accused of plagiarizing in his 2021 doctoral dissertation. And earlier this month, the University of Washington dismissed a plagiarism complaint against Robin DiAngelo, the author of “White Fragility,” who said in a statement to The New York Times that the accusations against her came from activists seeking to discredit progressive scholars who support DEI initiatives.

Though popular plagiarism detector TurnItIn got its start in 1998, it was not being widely used in the early 2000s, Bailey said. Copying and pasting without attribution was likely more common then, he added, and he doesn’t think Pines’ article was run through any kind of plagiarism checker when it was submitted.

“The internet was, at that time, fairly popular, and people were doing research on the internet,” Bailey said. “But you had this overlap where the internet was ubiquitous but plagiarism detection software was not. And that’s kind of where this paper falls.”

A spokesperson for SPIE said it “considers plagiarism by authors and contributors in any form, to any degree, to be unethical, unacceptable, and a serious breach of professional conduct.”

Bailey said as someone who “cares deeply about plagiarism,” he finds the accusations frustrating for both himself and universities that have to investigate serious allegations even when they come from, as Bailey views it, a place of bad faith.

Correction: A prior version of this story misstated that Pines's paper was published in an academic journal run by SPIE. The story has been updated to reflect that it was published in conference proceedings.

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