[Nicholas Johnson, an architecture student at the University of Arizona,] said the plagiarism first caught his eye as he prepared to submit his master’s thesis for a review that would determine whether he’d graduate. He stumbled upon it, he said, while searching online for the thesis [his UA professor] had done for her own master’s degree, which he planned to compare to his to make sure he’d done it right.
Fearing his future could be jeopardized if he spoke up, he initially kept quiet, he said.
The document Johnson came across in his search was a “statement of interest” [his professor] posted online in 2010 to apply for a visiting professorship at an architecture school in London…
Some of the wording was identical to Johnson’s thesis proposal. “At first it was hard to believe my eyes,” he recalled.