The $600,000 plagiarism report the University of Maryland won’t release

The flagship university said its president was vindicated but won’t share the details

On the last Friday evening of fall classes, the University System of Maryland released a one-page letter announcing the president of its flagship campus was cleared of allegations he plagiarized portions of a paper he co-authored in 2002.

The investigation, led by an outside law firm the university paid up to $600,000, produced a report on research by Darryll Pines, who’s served as president of the University of Maryland, College Park since 2020. That report, officials said, will not be released because it’s a personnel record and exempt from public disclosure under Maryland law.Personnel records can include performance ratings and documents pertaining to one’s ability to perform a job.

Mike Sandler, a spokesperson for the university system, declined to comment but noted that the decision was made after a regularly scheduled Friday board meeting. Pines, through a College Park spokesperson, declined to comment on whether he’d personally request the release of the report. But some national and state advocates said that wasn’t acceptable.

“To announce the results of the process without really revealing any of the details does not communicate transparency to the public,” said Steven McGuire, a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. “They owe it to alumni, and really to the public in general, to the Maryland taxpayers, to make very publicly clear why he is not guilty of these allegations.”

The system hired the law firm Ropes & Gray to oversee the investigation. According to contracts obtained by The Banner through a public records request, the university paid the firm $199,999 during an “inquiry phase.” Another contract enabled the firm to continue the work, stipulating the total not exceed $600,000.

The contractor’s billing rate during the investigation, according to a signed consultant agreement, was $1,200 per hour. The law firm underwent three rounds of review, with a broadened scope that included other co-authored journal articles and works by Pines.

Pines began teaching at the state’s flagship university in 1995. The plagiarism allegation involved 1,500 words of a 5,000-word paper that were allegedly taken from a tutorial website called “Surfing the Wavelets,” last updated in 1996.

The board of regents and the system’s chancellor “continue to have great confidence” in Pines and “strongly affirm his role” as UMD’s president, the letter released in mid-December stated.

The review, which took over a year, was not meant to “determine if a citation was missed or improperly made, as failure to properly cite scholarly work can occur without intent to engage in scholarly misconduct,” according to the state’s public university system. Rather, it was to assess whether there was misconduct.

When it comes to plagiarism cases, there is a narrow definition of misconduct, said Susan Blum, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies plagiarism at universities and has written a book on the topic.

The Maryland system’s definition of academic misconduct includes plagiarism, which it defines as “the intentional or unintentional use and re-use of one’s own or another person’s ideas, theories, words, data work or product.” The College Park campus also includes plagiarism in its definition of academic misconduct; the policy states misconduct includes not citing material or doing so incorrectly. If a student at the university is found responsible for misconduct such as plagiarism, they are given the grade of an “XF,” with the notation “failure due to academic misconduct” on their official transcript.

“Because there’s no public report, we can’t say for sure why he was cleared,” Blum said, noting that “1,500 identical words is a lot of words.”

Blum said it was likely the university system doesn’t want Pines’ “stature or credibility to be undermined.”

Whether the report can be considered a personnel record is also not black and white, said Andrew Ziaja, a law professor at the University of Baltimore.

Ziaja said the report could be considered exempt from a public records request if it included discussion of whether the president “was really qualified to have held the position in the first place.”

It’s unusual that the record in question involves the president of a university, Ziaja noted. And, he said, Pines could release the report himself to avoid public scrutiny.

“He’s in the driver’s seat and can decide to what extent he would like to make it public,” the law professor said.

Pines should release the report even if some information needs to be redacted, said Joanne Antoine, the executive director of Common Cause Maryland, an organization that works with other groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, to promote transparency in government.

“The public deserves to know,” she said. “A significant amount of public dollars were invested into the actual investigation.”

Antoine questioned why Pines wouldn’t want a report vindicating him publicized.

“I think, in this case, specifically students, parents, staff that are on campus deserve to know,” she said. “Especially at a place like UMD.”

If the university and Pines hold firm in keeping the report private, it will set a precedent within the university system, Antoine said, because Pines is not the only public university leader to be accused of plagiarizing recently. Last fall, a former professor at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore accused President Heidi Anderson of plagiarizing parts of her 1986 dissertation. Anderson requested an assessment of her work after The Banner reported on the allegations. She sued the former professor who alleged the plagiarism.

The letter released by the university system clearing Pines stated the committee reviewing the accusations “did determine that the two works highlighted last year contained select portions of text previously published by another author in the introductory sections.”

The letter continued that “a discrepancy in assignment of authorship was made.”

The system’s letter only presents more questions about the investigation, said McGuire, the fellow at the alumni and trustees association who has written about other presidential plagiarism cases.

“Are they blaming it on the co-author?” McGuire asked. “Even if they are, does President Pines still bear some responsibility for putting his name on a work that contained the words of another person without proper attribution?”

McGuire said the way the system handled the investigation could be “immensely damaging” to the reputation of UMD, given “public confidence and trust in higher education is quite low.”

Fewer than half of Americans have confidence in the nation’s colleges and universities, according to a recent Gallup poll. Although the percentage has increased since 2023 — from 36% to 42% now — it remains well below the 57% of Americans who were confident in the higher education system in 2015, when Gallup began to measure confidence.

This piece was originally published by The Baltimore Banner on January 8, 2026.