December 16, 2025
The two parties both have lawsuits open, as the disgruntled professor claims she was forced out due to her whiteness.
An HBCU President is embroiled in a legal battle with a former professor regarding plagiarism accusations on a decades-old dissertation.
The president of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Heidi Anderson, filed a defamation suit against Donna Satterlee, a former professor at UMES. Anderson claims her former employee, Satterlee, stifled career opportunities with her character attacks.
Anderson stated that Satterlee, who is white, claims that she is a “scam artist” who plagiarized parts of her 1986 dissertation, and these accusations lead to cancelled speaking engagements and more. Now, she is seeking $1 million in damages due to the professor’s comments on her character, according to The Grio.
The statements were made as Satterlee spoke out against alleged corruption at the HBCU. The begrudged professor left her position at UMES last December, despite initially seeking a full-time professorship.
Instead, she was met with calls for termination by administrators over claims she violated the HBCU’s bullying policies. However, she has since filed a wrongful termination lawsuit. Satterlee herself claims that she was forced out due to her race and retaliation over calling out the school’s issues.
She is one of many former employees suing the university, the other three also claiming fraud and “criminal activity” by the HBCU’s administrators. One of her issues is with Anderson, who she believe is “not qualified to be president.”
However, Anderson intends to “take a stand” against the professor with her own suit. Particularly on the plagiarism claims, Anderson defended her actions, stating that citation standards at the time were different.
“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.”
While Satterlee never taught Anderson during her matriculation, she decided to check on the president’s own academic integrity in 2024.
Amid her mounting grievances with UMES, which she believes prevented her appointment to a full-time role, she double-checked Anderson’s dissertation. The reveal of a 27% plagiarism check on plagiarism-checking website “Turnitin” led to a public doxxing of the HBCU President.
“I was upset with the way Anderson was treating me and also talking with students about plagiarism,” Satterlee told The Washington Post. “Both contributed to me reviewing her dissertation.”
The two parties will appear at court this December.
RELATED CONTENT: HBCU President Grateful After Kidney Transplant Following Commencement Plea For A Donor
