The president of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore has been accused of plagiarizing portions of her doctoral dissertation in a complaint to the university system.

Heidi Anderson is accused of lifting seven paragraphs of her 400-page dissertation nearly verbatim from a previously published scholarly article. An additional three paragraphs in the 1986 dissertation included in-text citations but no quotation marks. The complaint was filed by a former UMES professor who is also alleging reverse discrimination in a lawsuit against the university.

Overseeing a student body of roughly 3,000, Anderson has served as president of the historically Black university in Somerset County since 2018. She earned her doctoral degree in pharmacy administration from Purdue University.

The accusations mark the second time in just over a year that a university president in the state’s public system has been accused of plagiarism. University of Maryland, College Park President Darryll Pines was accused last fall of inappropriately lifting passages without attribution in a scientific paper he co-authored in 2002. The university system said the accusation against Pines is still under investigation.

Donna Satterlee, who was an associate professor of human ecology at UMES from 2002 through 2024, filed the complaint against Anderson to the university system’s Office of Internal Audit through its fraud reporting hotline last month. The office is tasked with evaluating complaints and determining whether they should be investigated.

Satterlee said she put Anderson’s dissertation through computer software that looks for and flags instances of potential plagiarism. She said the program found that Anderson’s dissertation, on the effectiveness of computer-assisted instruction versus traditional lectures in teaching pharmacy students about nonprescription drugs, plagiarized portions of text from a 1981 paper by Robert M. Caldwell about computer-based medical education.

Satterlee, who now works with graduate students at Wilmington University in Delaware to help prepare and submit their dissertations, said she scrutinized Anderson’s dissertation because of negative interactions she had with the UMES president previously.

Satterlee is representing herself in a lawsuit that alleges she was “unlawfully terminated” from UMES and that members of her department, as well as senior leadership, preferentially hired African American employees over white and Asian applicants. The suit, filed Aug. 15, names Anderson, members of her leadership team, the university system and its chancellor, Jay Perman.

The Banner independently reviewed both the dissertation and Caldwell’s paper, finding several passages of text in the dissertation that do not use quotation marks or other direct attribution.

In some cases, the text is verbatim, while in others, Anderson includes some minor filler words. Anderson’s dissertation also includes passages lifted almost word-for-word from a second academic paper published three years before her dissertation with no quotations marks.

Purdue University, which awarded Anderson her doctorate, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Officials at the University System of Maryland and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore declined to comment, but Tina Wilson, the chair of the UMES Board of Visitors, released a letter supporting Anderson on her Facebook page.

“Two lawsuits alleging discrimination and a reckless, anonymous accusation sent to The Baltimore Banner attempting to undermine Dr. Anderson’s academic credentials are emblematic of [a] disturbing trend,” Wilson wrote in the letter. It was signed by five other people, including Anderson’s dissertation advisor at Purdue.

Four lawsuits have been filed in the last three months by current and former UMES employees against Anderson and the university. All of the lawsuits, including Satterlee’s, accuse Anderson and her leadership team of creating a hostile work environment and perpetuating various forms of fraud on campus.

Wilson wrote that the claim was “a destructive distraction from the important work of advancing education, equity and opportunity,” and that the claim follows a “calculated pattern aimed at discrediting Dr. Anderson’s leadership and legacy.”

Wilson wrote that she stands “firmly” with Anderson despite the accusations.

“We affirm our confidence in her leadership, her character and her scholarly integrity,” Wilson wrote.

Experts on academic plagiarism, however, described the allegation against Anderson as troubling after reviewing portions of Caldwell’s original article and Anderson’s dissertation side by side.

“This isn’t good,” said Jonathan Bailey, the head of Plagiarism Today, a consulting firm that studies the issue. “It doesn’t necessarily invalidate the entire dissertation, but it does raise issues that would need an in-depth investigation.”

The allegedly plagiarized passages are in the introduction and the literature review sections of Anderson’s dissertation.

“Plagiarism in the background of a paper is not as severe, [but] it is still considered plagiarism and could have been easy rectified in this paper,” Bailey said. “It’s another sign that points more to sloppiness and recklessness rather than malice, but at some point recklessness becomes its own integrity violation.”

Bailey said the lack of in-text citations is “worrisome,” but that the allegations against Anderson were not as severe as the ones against Pines, president of the state’s flagship university.

A September 2024 story by The Daily Wire alleged that 1,500 words of the 5,000-word paper co-authored by Pines and published in 2002 was taken directly from a tutorial website called “Surfing the Wavelets,” which was last updated in 1996. Pines was a professor at the University of Maryland when the paper was published.

The investigation into Pines is being conducted by Ropes & Gray, an independent law firm. So far, according to records obtained by The Banner, the investigation has cost the University of Maryland, College Park just under $400,000.

In recent years, there has been a growing frequency in accusations of plagiarism against Black university leaders.

In 2023, Harvard University President Claudine Gay was accused of plagiarizing sections from multiple published papers. That same year, Alade McKen, who was in charge of diversity, equity and inclusion at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, was accused of plagiarizing parts of his doctoral dissertation. And in 2018, Hobart and William Smith Colleges President Gregory Vincent was accused of plagiarizing his published work.

Debora Weber-Wulff, a professor who studies plagiarism at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, said an investigation into Anderson’s dissertation is warranted. She, like Bailey, reviewed portions of the dissertation, as well as Caldwell’s original article.

“This is definitely plagiarism,” Weber-Wulff said. “The important question is, is there more?”

If the findings are serious, she said, Anderson should be stripped of her doctorate degree.

“If a student had done this in a paper, it would be sufficient enough for a fail,” she said.

It’s not common to revoke a doctoral degree from an academic, but it has happened.

In 2016, Pennsylvania State University revoked a graduate’s Ph.D. after administrators discovered they had plagiarized parts of their thesis. And in 2014, former Montana Sen. John E. Walsh had his master’s degree from the U.S. Army War College stripped because of plagiarism.

Though the accusations against Anderson cover only a few pages, Bailey, the American plagiarism expert, said an investigation is needed to examine the whole document more thoroughly.

“One of the things I’ve learned over the years, is when you find issues like these, there are often other issues in the paper that haven’t yet been discovered,” Bailey said.

About the Education Hub

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