Can I suggest it is time to call off the plagiarism police? Case in point. Journalism professor admits plagiarism. Yup, it is a neat headline. So was this a Jayson Blair-style rip-off? Hardly. In fact it wasn’t plagiarism at all.

The plagiarism in question was three quotes (lifted from this piece) included in a curmudgeonly op-ed in a college publication called the Missourian by an elderly journalism professor called John Merrill.

The original piece (and yes, you do kind of have to care to bother reading…):

The Women’s and Gender Studies Program is becoming a full-fledged department in the College of Arts and Science, effective this semester.

“For us, it means new opportunities,” said Jessica Jennrich, director of Undergraduate Advising, Curriculum and Programming for the department. “We can offer new classes and more classes, and it gives us more visibility.”

Merrill uses the quote in the following “grumpy old man” fashion:

It doesn’t really surprise me, but I now learn that MU is getting a new, full-fledged department … It is called the women’s and gender studies department. The director of undergraduate advising for the new department, Jessica Jennrich, said that they can “now offer new classes and more classes, and it gives us more visibility.”

A whole department, mind you, just like philosophy and English … What about a department of male studies or homosexual studies?

You can see where Merrill is headed. It’s political correctness gone mad! Still, he wasn’t hauled up for lack of originality.

His crime? According to the Missourian editor:

By directly quoting sources, Professor Merrill implies to the reader that he spoke with those people. There was no independent verification of facts through original reporting. A reader should be able to judge the source of information, including whether information was taken from other publications.

So, if he was blogging Merrill would probably have linked to them. But I certainly didn’t think he’d spoken to them, did you? It read to me like he was quoting them (the “quotation marks” are an indicator). And actually attributing them makes not the slightest difference to the piece (apart from adding in a layer of ugliness and prolixity). As for verifying the facts? Please.

For the record, here are the Missourian’s standards:

The following is a listing of what constitutes plagiarism in the newsroom:

• Taking material verbatim from the archive. Even if the article was printed in the Missourian, it is still someone else’s work. Put it in your own words or attribute it to the Missourian “as previously reported in the Missourian.”
• Using material verbatim from the wire. Localizing wire stories is encouraged, but the wire service should be given a credit line.
• Using material from other publications without attribution.
• Using news releases verbatim.
• Using material off a Web site verbatim.

Are these rules intended to discipline young journalists or beat up old professors?

They certainly don’t produce good journalism. They instil a dead respect for things that carry their own weight. Writing down someone else’s words is not work and doesn’t create a new form of property right. And guess what – no facts were verified in this post. Maybe there is no place called Missouri.

Sourcing quotes is important for CONTEXT – to help people UNDERSTAND something.

No one reading Merrill’s piece could possibly have gained anything from learning where his quotes had originally appeared, any more than they would have been helped by knowing what the people quoted liked for breakfast.

So an old man is humiliated, but the Missourian’s rules retain their virtue. God bless the rules.