Thomas A. Matrka has his master’s degree in engineering from Ohio University and a good job in the private sector as a mechanical engineer. So why is he still spending so much time and energy trying to prove that as many as 30 master’s theses in the university’s engineering college contain unoriginal work?

“They’re compromising the value of the degree of honest students by not distinguishing between the plagiarism and the honest works,” says Matrka. He has spent lunch hours poring over hundreds of pages of theses in the university’s library and writing university officials and accreditors on a one-man quest to spur an investigation by those better qualified than he is to judge plagiarism. “I’m no expert – I’m one guy over there poking around the library. I just want them to look into it and remove these from the public record, because you’ve tainted all of us by leaving them there.”