She submitted it in 2000 and that may have played a role in it. These days, colleges routinely use programs that check submitted papers and stuff, especially Thesis work, to see if there is plagiarism, and something that has as many issues with copying as this thesis does would raise red flags (my son’s minor’s thesis was checked like that, and they found someone whose work was close enough to my son’s they asked him to make changes; they knew it wasn’t plagiarism, but they didn’t want any chance of that, they were talking about having his thesis published in a journal who would check). I don’t know if this kind of stuff was available in 2000, it also depends on what she plagiarized from as well, if that was online, back then it may not have been, today almost everything is.
As to why an advisor would miss it, it could be the person was sloppy and simply trusted her, it could be that the wording in the thesis didn’t strike him/her as being different than what Crowley wrote before, or if you are a more cynical person you could assume corruption of some sort on the part of the advisor…
I think Columbia is right not to immediately comment, they have to go through a process of review. On the other hand, given how egregious this is, and given that they likely have all kinds of tools to check her thesis against what is out there and see for themselves if it is plagiarism, they won’t have much excuse to drag this out and not only that but dragging it out will make it seem like they are trying to cover this up to protect crowley and/or themselves (I release the report years down the road when she is no longer a hot item in the papers and few people would notice it), I will say that they should have every reason to expedite and no good arguments not to, if tools show she pulled this amount of stuff from other writings, as the article claims, there can be little in her defense, this is not similar ideas from what I can tell, but word for word plagiarism.