I suspect that if we went through a lot of old dissertations we would find a lot of plagiarism.

In my mind, there is a difference between simple sloppiness and meeting deadlines versus a combination of apathy and lack of integrity. I'd assume most issues in old dissertations are due to the former.

I used to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume sloppiness on such things until I once had a VP in my company e-mail me a 40-50 page white paper on sensor technologies and ask my opinion of it: a white paper that I had written myself about 6 months earlier which had my name deleted off of it. My response was that I had written it. I never heard anything more and I couldn't prove anything, but in hindsight, I wondered how much of my work had been passed on without my name in the past. I started using TeX to generate PDF format reports after that instead of using Office.

I'll be blunt. When I see someone who's made a career of hopping up a bureaucratic ladder from one position to another, I apply a different level of scrutiny wondering if something like this is just the tip of an iceberg of a general pattern. There are people who are good leaders for whom advancement is a natural result of accomplishment and trust; then there are people whose primary talent is cultivating relationships with VIPs that result in promotion and getting credit for a list of things that they had little to do with; leaving behind a string of frustrated colleagues and subordinates who cannot believe that person can pull the wool over so many people's eyes.

I know nothing of the people involved in this situation and have no motivation to look further; but I remain open-minded to a range of possible scenarios.