Heidi Anderson never imagined she would take a former professor to court. Not as a university president, and certainly not over her decades-old dissertation.
But the University of Maryland Eastern Shore leader, who is Black, and former professor Donna Satterlee, who is White, are now locked in dueling lawsuits over plagiarism, defamation and race. Later this week, they will have their first day in court.
Earlier this fall, Satterlee began telling news outlets that Anderson had plagiarized several paragraphs of her 1986 dissertation. Anderson said she was confident that wasn’t true, and that an investigation would prove it. So she called the chancellor of Maryland’s university system and asked for a formal inquiry.
Satterlee had left UMES in turmoil last December and sued for wrongful termination this summer. She maintained she had been illegally pushed out because of her race and had been punished for calling out corruption at the historically Black institution. On Oct. 15, Satterlee took her story to the conservative TV network Newsmax, where she accused Anderson of reverse discrimination, called the college president a “scam artist” and repeated the plagiarism claims.
Anderson said she didn’t consider legal action until another professor said during a faculty meeting that the spiraling allegations were affecting them all, and that it felt like an attack on the university. On Oct. 24, Anderson filed a defamation suit seeking $1 million in damages. She said in an interview that citation standards were different in the 1980s, and she did nothing wrong.
“I stayed quiet for as long as I could,” Anderson said. “There’s no plagiarism here. It’s an attack on me and my character and all of us at the university. I needed to take a stand.”
Since Satterlee’s plagiarism allegations surfaced, Anderson said she has lost a speaking opportunity and received several racist messages. She is the latest Black university leader — at Harvard, at the University of Maryland and elsewhere — accused of plagiarism. The tensions at Eastern Shore also mirror hostilities occurring across American higher education, as the Trump administration seeks to scale back diversity programs it sees as discriminatory.
The allegations come at a tense time for the university, as three other current and former employees have also filed suits since July alleging Anderson and the school had engaged in “criminal activity,” unlawful termination of funding and “fraud with federal funds.”
The university also recently lost its classification as an R2 research institution, though its student enrollment is rebuilding after falling to a recent low in 2021.
Satterlee is holding her ground, saying Anderson is trying to silence her by filing the defamation suit.
“This is vicious retaliation,” she said. “It’s not going to deter me or intimidate me. Anderson is not qualified to be president.”
Satterlee began her career at UMES in 2002 as a lecturer in the School of Agricultural and Natural Sciences teaching child development, one of few White faculty at the university. She became a professor in 2013 and was awarded tenure in 2019.
Anderson, who holds a PhD in pharmacy administration from Purdue University, started her presidency in 2018 at the campus of about 3,000 students in Somerset County. Before coming to Eastern Shore, she was provost at Texas A&M University at Kingsville, and held the same role earlier at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.
In her lawsuit, Satterlee alleges that Anderson and other senior leaders at Eastern Shore expressed preferences for hiring and promoting Black candidates.
“White and Asian faculty are treated as second-class citizens at UMES,” she wrote.
Satterlee said she was paid less than other faculty in her department and alleges she was passed over for promotions — despite receiving positive reviews and feedback from students.
UMES declined to answer questions on Satterlee’s allegation and said a public records request for salaries of staff in her department going back to 2018 would take 80 hours to complete and cost at least an estimated $6,000.
Tensions escalated when Satterlee applied for a full professor role in January 2024. Her lawsuit alleges a department hiring committee said she passed the minimum requirements and praised her work, but the administration rejected her application later that spring.
As she was applying for the promotion, the school was investigating Satterlee’s alleged bullying of her boss. Eastern Shore found Satterlee guilty of violating its bullying policy, which she said came from correcting her boss’s grammar and spelling. University spokesperson Robert Vickers said the school wouldn’t comment on ongoing litigation.
Satterlee protested the finding, but under the advice of her lawyer, agreed to tender her resignation in exchange for a payment equivalent to 9.5 months of salary and a $41,223 contribution to her retirement plan, court documents show. Satterlee acknowledged she entered the agreement “knowingly and voluntarily” and waived her right to sue the university or its employees over anything arising from her employment.
Satterlee said she felt coerced to quit and filed a complaint in March alleging racial discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She then sued the college, Anderson and other Eastern Shore leaders in July for wrongful termination.
In a motion to dismiss the suit, the office of Maryland’s attorney general wrote that Satterlee had “engaged in bullying so egregious as to merit a recommendation of termination.” The university declined to answer questions about the bullying incident.
After filing the suit, Satterlee said she put Anderson’s 1986 dissertation into Turnitin, a plagiarism-checking site. She found several paragraphs lifted from another research paper and filed a complaint in the university system’s Office of Internal Audit. She then sent emails to reporters detailing the plagiarism allegations.
Satterlee told The Baltimore Banner she had checked the president’s dissertation for plagiarism because of her negative interactions with Anderson. In a later interview with The Washington Post, she said she had done so because she was teaching a class on writing dissertations at Wilmington University and wanted to use the doctoral thesis as an example.
“I was upset with the way Anderson was treating me and also talking with students about plagiarism,” she said when asked later how to reckon with the two different accounts. “Both contributed to me reviewing her dissertation.”
After the plagiarism allegations surfaced, Anderson said she called her PhD adviser, Holly L. Mason, who is still a mentor. Mason told her she had done nothing wrong, Anderson said. Latina Wilson, the chair of Eastern Shore’s Board of Visitors, wrotea letter with others supporting the president, saying the plagiarism allegations were an attempt to smear Anderson “rooted in personal grievance.”
The statewide university system said its review of the plagiarism allegations will be confidential until its conclusion.
Mason said in a document accompanying the defamation suit filed by Anderson that any errors in citation “are exceedingly minor and clearly unintentional.”
“Dr. Heidi M. Anderson conducted herself with integrity and adhered fully to the standards of academic honesty expected at Purdue University and the appropriate APA standards in place over 40 years ago,” she wrote.
Purdue did not respond to a request for comment.
Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism consultant, said Satterlee’s initial allegations were noteworthy but “not necessarily the end of the world,” as the text in question appeared in the literary review section and followed a reference to the author of the work.
But days after those allegations surfaced, The Daily Wire publisheda story detailing additional plagiarism claims, including an 1,000-word chunk from Anderson’s dissertation said to have been copied from a paper almost word-for-word without quotes.
“When it was just Satterlee’s claim, it was easy to put it in the context of sour grapes, trying to make hay out of a relatively minor issue,” Bailey said. “However, the new claims are much larger, cast much more doubt on the dissertation and represent a much more serious breach of academic integrity.”
Bailey said that Anderson’s claims — that citation norms were different in 1986 and she was just following the rules of the time — weren’t true.
He said the standards and principle of citing large sections of text have remained unchanged for centuries, though he noted that it may have been more common practice at the time since there wasn’t plagiarism detection software. The official APA guidance book from 1985 required citations but did not specifically name plagiarism.
Anderson’s lawyer, James Walker, pointed to Mason’s affidavit when asked how to reckon with Bailey’s perspective and the historical guidance.
“We cannot litigate the case in the press,” he said. “We spoke to the school and they reassured us verbally, in writing and in an affidavit that Dr. Anderson did not violate any rules, plagiarize or anything of the nature.”
On campus, many professors declined to answer questions about how the lawsuits are affecting the university. Jennifer Price, vice chair of the faculty senate, wouldn’t comment specifically on the case, but she did say operations have continued relatively as normal.
“The environment I experience reflects collaboration and commitment to student-centered services, adhering to the governance processes, and that focus from my perspective has remained consistent,” she said.
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