{"id":701,"date":"2007-11-13T18:05:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-14T00:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=701"},"modified":"2007-11-13T18:05:00","modified_gmt":"2007-11-14T00:05:00","slug":"time-to-call-off-the-plagiarism-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/11\/time-to-call-off-the-plagiarism-police\/","title":{"rendered":"Time to call off the plagiarism police?"},"content":{"rendered":"

C<\/span>an I suggest it is time to call off the plagiarism police? Case in point. Journalism professor admits plagiarism<\/a>. Yup, it is a neat headline. So was this a Jayson Blair<\/span><\/a>-style rip-off? Hardly. In fact it wasn\u2019t plagiarism<\/span> at all.<\/p>\n

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

The original piece (and yes, you do kind of have to care to bother reading…): <\/p>\n

The Women\u2019s and Gender Studies Program is becoming a full-fledged department in the College of Arts and Science, effective this semester.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor us, it means new opportunities,\u201d said Jessica Jennrich, director of Undergraduate Advising, Curriculum and Programming for the department. \u201cWe can offer new classes and more classes, and it gives us more visibility.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Merrill uses the quote in the following \u201cgrumpy old man\u201d fashion:<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t really surprise me, but I now learn that MU is getting a new, full-fledged department … It is called the women\u2019s and gender studies department. The director of undergraduate advising for the new department, Jessica Jennrich, said that they can \u201cnow offer new classes and more classes, and it gives us more visibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

A whole department, mind you, just like philosophy and English … What about a department of male studies or homosexual studies?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You can see where Merrill is headed. It\u2019s political correctness gone mad! Still, he wasn\u2019t hauled up for lack of originality.<\/p>\n

His crime? According to the Missourian<\/span> editor<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/span>So, if he was blogging Merrill would probably have linked to them. But <\/span>I certainly didn\u2019t think he\u2019d spoken to them, did you? It read to me like he was quoting them (the \u201cquotation marks\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

For the record, here are the Missourian<\/span>\u2019s standards:<\/p>\n

The following is a listing of what constitutes plagiarism in the newsroom:<\/p>\n