Another College President Plagiarized Her Dissertation. That’s Just the Tip of the Iceberg.

A college president and former chair of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities plagiarized extensively in her doctoral dissertation, a Daily Wire review found.

Heidi M. Anderson is president of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. For nearly four decades, she has climbed the academic ladder while producing an unremarkable amount of low-quality research.

Now, a lawsuit from a former Eastern Shore professor threatens to cast Anderson’s career in a startling new light. Donna Satterlee alleges that, under Anderson, low-skilled black faculty were hired based on their race and paid more than white faculty. The suit said whites were forced to do the work that black officials took credit for.

A Daily Wire review suggested that it could be a pattern that began with her 1986 doctoral dissertation for Purdue University, which kicked off her academic career.

Portions of the dissertation, which deal with the use of computers in pharmaceutical education, appear to be a repurposed and uncredited copy of a 1984 paper by Donna E. Larson, a professor of nursing, about the use of computers in nursing education, with simply the name of the field changed. The photos below show just the beginning of a lengthy section where Anderson appears to crib Larson’s eight points.

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When Anderson summarizes a book by Christopher Evans, she is actually copying someone else’s summary of Evans’s work, even though there is no parenthetical attribution in that section of the text indicating it. {snip}

Likewise, Anderson appears to have simply taken the language of University of Texas medical professor Robert M. Caldwell, writing about computers in medical schools, and changed the name of the field. Caldwell does not appear in the references section of that chapter.

A significant stretch of Anderson’s paper is identical to “Introduction to Instructional Media” (1978) by David H. Jonassen, even though Jonassen’s name never appears in her paper. That includes mirroring Jonassen’s language that something was “recent” in the world of computers, without the reader knowing that it was actually new almost a decade prior.

Anderson’s personal touches consisted of adding woke language and grammatical errors. {snip}

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In July, Satterlee sued the University of Maryland Eastern Shore and Anderson, saying, “Black faculty and administrators are paid vastly higher than others of similar or better qualifications. Heidi Anderson has instituted a two-tier system of racial preferences discriminating against White and Asian faculty who are given more and less-desirable work but significantly lower pay.”

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In 2023, Anderson served as president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, making her the face of public universities.

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