The president of the University of Maryland, Darryll J. Pines, was cleared of plagiarism Friday after a yearlong review prompted by allegations that his published work had lifted significant portions of a 2002 scholarly paper.
While the review, by the global law firm Ropes & Gray, found two papers that contained “select portions of text previously published by another author,” it concluded that Dr. Pines was not responsible for the inclusion of the text.
In another paper, the review found a discrepancy in “assignment of authorship.” But the review concluded that Dr. Pines was not responsible for any misconduct.
The findings were announced Friday night in a one-page statement from the chancellor’s office of the University System of Maryland, which declined to clarify or expand on its statement.
The university’s decision to conduct a review followed plagiarism accusations in a report last year in The Daily Wire, a publication co-founded by the conservative activist Ben Shapiro. Dr. Pines asked that the allegations be investigated. While he acknowledged in a letter to the Maryland faculty that there had been “recurrent language,” in his work, he denied there was merit to claims of plagiarism.
The claims against Dr. Pines came after a series of plagiarism accusations had been leveled at academics in 2024 — many of them focused on diversity efforts in universities and many of them Black. Most notably, anonymous plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, the former Harvard president who is Black, were among the factors that led to her resignation last year.
In a letter to the Maryland faculty last year, Dr. Pines, who is Black, noted that, like other academics, he had recently “come under scrutiny and attack, both personally and professionally, for a variety of reasons, including aspersions placed on my decision-making and my values.”
A spokeswoman for Dr. Pines said he would have no comment beyond the statement issued by the chancellor’s office, which reaffirmed support for Dr. Pines’s leadership at the University of Maryland, in College Park.
A graduate of M.I.T. and a professor of aerospace engineering, Dr. Pines has a large body of work, including more than 250 papers on topics such as spacecraft navigation and a human-powered helicopter.
In its article, The Daily Wire ran excerpts from work published by Dr. Pines and a co-author, Liming Salvino, alongside similar passages from a piece published in 1996 by Joshua Altmann, then a university student in Australia.
Dr. Altmann, who currently works in the oil industry in Qatar, said in an interview last year that the work appeared to come from a paper he published while in graduate school. Dr. Salvino, a former program officer with the Office of Naval Research, could not be reached for comment.
Stephanie Saul reports on colleges and universities, with a recent focus on the dramatic changes in college admissions and the debate around diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
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