How Hard Is It for a University to Revoke a Ph.D.?

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Monica Crowley backed out of a job in the Donald J. Trump administration this week following reports that she had plagiarized parts of her dissertation. But whether her Columbia University Ph.D. could be in jeopardy is another matter.

The conservative commentator and aide to the president-elect was found in a report last week to have plagiarized more than 50 pages of her 2012 book, leading its publisher to halt sales. Days later, another report showed similar instances of plagiarism in her 2000 Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, prompting questions about how the university would respond. In a statement last week to The Chronicle, Columbia suggested a review was possible but did not provide details on what’s next.

Cases of Ph.D. revocation are rare. Pennsylvania State University stripped a graduate’s Ph.D. last year because of plagiarism, marking only the third such instance in its history, according to Candice Yekel, associate vice president for research at Penn State. Last fall the University of Colorado at Boulder took away a degree because of falsification of research data. At the time a university spokesman said it was the first such instance anyone knew of at the institution.

In one high-profile case, a former U.S. senator from Montana, John E. Walsh, had his master’s degree from the U.S. Army War College stripped in 2014 because of plagiarism discovered in his thesis.

Ms. Crowley did not cite the plagiarism allegations in a statement to reporters, instead pointing to other employment opportunities as her reason for not taking the job as director of strategic communications for the White House’s National Security Council. Ms. Crowley earned three degrees from Columbia, including her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 2000, according to a university spokesman Robert Hornsby.

If Columbia acts on the allegations against Ms. Crowley, it could be a while before any punishments are handed out. Cases of academic and research misconduct are handled differently, depending on the institution and the alleged violation.

Detecting Misconduct

Academic-integrity accusations, like the one against Ms. Crowley, are more likely to vary from institution to institution, said Tricia Bertram Gallant, an official at the International Center for Academic Integrity. Ms. Bertram Gallant, who is also the academic-integrity officer at the University of California at San Diego, said cases of reported misconduct are few.

“A general rule of thumb is less than 1 percent of students are reported for misconduct,” she said.

But continuing surveys by the center suggest that as many as 30 percent of students worldwide admit to having committed some sort of plagiarism, Ms. Bertram Gallant said. “And it’s important to keep in mind these numbers are self-reported, so they may be low,” she added.

Academic misconduct often is associated more with undergraduate programs. It’s rare, she said, to see problems with dissertations because the process is already so intensive, with close collaboration with an adviser and oversight by a dissertation committee.

“Really with the Ph.D. process, you have a committee and you should have multiple drafts that are being reviewed by the committee. Theoretically, the plagiarism should be caught way before the Ph.D. has ever been granted,” Ms. Bertram Gallant said. And plagiarism-detection software such as Turnitin has made it even more likely that misconduct will be spotted early.

“Depending on how long ago the person did the dissertation, if it was pre-Turnitin days, it was a little bit harder to review everything,” Ms. Bertram Gallant said. “If any Ph.D. program is accepting papers without running them through Turnitin or another one of these plagiarism-detection softwares, then they’re doing themselves a disservice.”

Why It Matters

More intensive and more structured review policies tend to cover research misconduct, like the case last year at Penn State. Ms. Yekel said that any investigation of research misconduct, whether or not it results in the revocation of a degree, takes a long time.

“It is a lengthy process. There is sufficient due process built into the entire process from allegation to decision to allow people to exchange information,” Ms. Yekel said.

As the university’s research-integrity officer, Ms. Yekel said she’s among the first to know of any allegations of research misconduct. The process for reviewing claims of plagiarism or any other research violation can take months, she said, and involve more than a dozen people. She is also the first to review any allegation, which can be submitted anonymously to her office. She then decides whether it’s worth pursuing.

If it is, the process moves to an inquiry stage, then an investigation, and a review of a report by the vice president for research.

But, Ms. Yekel said, few claims make it all the way to investigation.

“You can imagine we get a half a dozen to a dozen allegations a year. Not all of them go to investigation, some of them don’t meet the definition of research misconduct, or just aren’t credible, but we have a couple a year that do,” she said.

In the 2016 case, it took more than a year from the time of the initial allegation to the announcement of the decision, at a meeting of Penn State’s Graduate Council.

Ms. Bertram Gallant said another factor complicating the work of upholding research integrity is that plagiarism isn’t taken seriously enough because it’s hard to explain why it should matter.

“People don’t see plagiarism in a Ph.D. as impacting them,” she said. “It does have this impact, but I think people can’t see that. Because there’s no physical harm, people can easily downgrade the impact of the problem.”

“There’s a lot of people that don’t even write their own dissertations,” she said. “They pay somebody else to write their dissertations. It’s way more common than I think we might hear, and if the public is really interested in this, they need to understand that it’s more commonplace than we think.”

Correction (1/18/2017, 10:57 a.m.): A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that a recent instance of a Ph.D. revocation at Pennsylvania State University was the second such instance in the institution’s history. It was the third. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.